Episode 11: The Teacher As Encourager with Whitney White
Transcript:
(transcribed by kayla.r.fainer@gmail.com)
Melissa Milner 00:09
Hi, this is Melissa Milner. Welcome to The Teacher As... podcast. The goal of this weekly podcast is to help you explore your passions and learn from others in education and beyond to better your teaching. The Teacher As... will highlight uncommon parallels to teaching, as well as share practical ideas for the classroom.
In this episode, I interview Whitney White. He was my theater professor at Salem State College. It's now Salem State University. So Whitney sat me down one day. I was struggling in his-- I don't remember the exact name of the course. But I was struggling in his course where we had to do set design. We had to draw our vision of the set, and then we had to make a model of that set.
And I went in for acting. And I enjoyed doing backstage work, but I never saw myself as an artist as far as being able to draw, and think of something in my head, and get it on a piece of paper, and have it look anything like the way I wanted it. So I expressed that to Whizz.
And I remember we were on the main stage. I don't think anybody else was around at that point. We were either hanging lights or-- I don't know what we were doing. But he pulled over a stool to center stage, and he placed a screwdriver on the stool. And he said, draw this. And I was like, oh, I'm not gonna be able to draw it. I don't know how to do perspective. And he was like, just look at the screwdriver. Don't make it up. Just take a minute and look at the screwdriver, and draw what you see.
And I did it, and it came out pretty decent. And my whole mindset changed. And I do wonder whether if I had had, maybe in middle school or high school, an art teacher, if I had reached out to that art teacher, would they have done the same for me? And would I have maybe been able to be practicing my drawing for all those years and be getting really good at it?
So it was very much a growth mindset lesson for me. So I can't wait to share the amazing tornado that is Whitney White. Enjoy the interview.
Welcome to The Teacher As... podcast, Professor Emeritus Whitney L. White, but we always knew you as Whizz. Welcome to the show.
Whitney White 02:41
Well, thank you very much, Melissa. I'm happy to do this.
Melissa Milner 02:43
I can't thank you enough for taking the time out to talk to me. What do you want The Teacher As... listeners to know about you?
Whitney White 02:51
Well, I think that it is probably most important for some of your listeners who may be teachers to know that I did have teacher training in college. And I think that talking to-- my wife was also a teacher, spent 25 years teaching sixth grade. She said that although there are people that go right into college teaching without having done any teacher training, that the teacher training was still better than just figuring it out on your own.
Many people go into college teaching from a profession or from some other area of life. They go into college teaching having never taught or thought about the pedagogy of teaching. So I did. I was never going to be a teacher, but because I was in a small Catholic girls' school in the middle of Kansas-- yes, I was one of the first 16 men ever to set foot on the campus of Marymount College of Salina, Kansas.
Melissa Milner 04:04
Wow.
Whitney White 04:06
Yeah. How I got there, that's a whole other story. But anyway, when I got there, one of the things that they did very well was they taught teachers. And so when the theater department was formed, which was actually the year I got there, they invented the theater department, they decided that they would be training teachers as well as, possibly, practitioners of the theater.
Melissa Milner 04:32
Wow. You started out wanting to do what in the theater? Did you want to-- I know you were big on set design.
Whitney White 04:41
No, I was an actor. I was an actor, and then my mother was a musical director. And the summer I was 13 years old, I got shipped from New Jersey and all my friends up to the campus of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where a friend of my mother's from New York City had a deal with the college that she had their theater building, which was wicked cool. It was this old-- I have a picture somewhere. But it's like an old piece of a castle sitting right in the middle of the property. It wasn't connected to any other building.
Melissa Milner 05:22
Wow.
Whitney White 05:24
So we were all by ourselves, and it was very, very, very cool. But what I ended up having happen was, although I did do all technical stuff, every show I would be running to the fly rail and manipulating battens flying in and out for different scenes. And then after the scene change was over, someone would adjust my costume that I was wearing, and I would run out and stand in the back and sing. Because I have a (SUNG) pretty good singing voice. (SPOKEN) As a matter of fact, my last thing in college was I played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.
Melissa Milner 06:05
Oh my gosh.
Whitney White 06:06
(SUNG) If I was a rich man.
Melissa Milner 06:13
Oh, Whizz, you are awesome.
Whitney White 06:16
So anyway, but I have to say that even with the education courses that I had to take, the real way that I think that I got my methodology of teaching, if it was that at all, was probably from picking the things from my favorite teachers that got me to want to learn. Because I think that's one of the biggest things that any teacher has as a duty and responsibility. And that is, you have to find a way to encourage your students to want this information.
Melissa Milner 07:00
Yes.
Whitney White 07:01
Now, if you're talking about what makes a great teacher, there's all kinds of lists. But many of them have the same things. And number one, for me, you better have a deep knowledge and a passion for your subject. If you don't love the area that you want to communicate to someone else at a teacher/student level, what are you doing? Go do something else.
And I realize some of you out there that are listening, you may be teaching things that you never thought that you would teach, because you had an opportunity to teach and you took the job. And I certainly understand that, and that doesn't mean that you can't have that passion. It just means that maybe you didn't start with it, and knowing that it's important that you should go and take more classes about that.
Let's say that you're a science teacher, but you get an opportunity to teach history in a local high school. Well, what are you going to do? Turn it down? A job's a job, right? You know how to teach. I used to kid, I don't know if you ever heard me say this, but people would ask me about teaching.
And I'd say, well, if you're really a good teacher, you can teach a course on anything. And if you wanted me to teach a course on nuclear physics, which I know very little about, I could do that for you, one 45 minute class, if you gave me a week. It would take me a week to immerse myself into that information so that I wasn't looking at it. Do you remember your worst teachers?
Melissa Milner 08:35
Yes.
Whitney White 08:36
Some of my worst teachers had a book open on their desk.
Melissa Milner 08:39
Exactly.
Whitney White 08:40
And they were constantly referring to the book. And I would be like, well, wait, what? Why don't I just read the book? You're not giving me anything more. And I think if you remember my classes, I was sort of famous for my more , which was usually in the form of stories about other shows, and other theaters, and other designers who had used the things that I was telling you to learn from the book in a way that I could then describe to you how you take that and you expand on it.
I don't know if you remember, but one of the things that I start with in the basic lighting courses was a thing that's called the McCandless theory. And what it is, is it's the duties and responsibilities of the scene designer or the lighting designer. And basically what he did was he wrote down some very basic things. So what I would say in my class was, I want you to memorize this.
And the reason I want you to memorize this is for the same reason that if you were taking me for karate, I would have you memorize kata. Kata are like little dances that you'd memorize every movement, and you repeat it over and over and over. The reason that you do that is so that when you get into a battle, a test, you don't have to think about doing those things. And then you take them and make them your own.
And that's what I was trying to do as an upper level college professor. I was trying to give people the basics, get them to know them so well that when they got into a situation where they needed that information, they wouldn't have to think about it. And then when you don't have to think about it, then all of a sudden, the creative part comes in.
Melissa Milner 10:30
Yeah, that's beautifully said. At this point, I just want my listeners to just think for a second. You hear the way Whizz talks. You hear his excitement and passion. You can understand why he was one of my favorite teachers of all time. I just can't thank you enough. So I have a few stories. One was, you did a little lighting design for a small little musical called Hair.
Whitney White 10:56
Oh, yeah. That was the little one. I believe it was 450 units, and we had to rent back then, because the lighting was not built into the theater. We had to rent six and a half miles of cable.
Melissa Milner 11:09
Yes. And I was the light board operator.
Whitney White 11:12
Oh my gosh, that's right!
Melissa Milner 11:14
Yeah. And it was 300+ cues. I'd never touched a light board before, and your patience in teaching me, and your confidence! You just kept saying, you've got this, you've got this. You didn't learn that in college. You, innately, are a good teacher.
So is there anything else you can tell the listeners that made you know and helped me have a growth mindset? How did you know that I could do it? Or were you lying and you were hoping you were right?
Whitney White 11:44
Well, no. Let me tell you something, that in my life, even up to that point, what I had learned about people was that people that are discouraged don't do well. People that are encouraged do well. And I was an example of that. There were people that discouraged me from doing things. And I don't think you were there for my ship set. You weren't there for Final Passages, right?
Melissa Milner 12:19
No.
Whitney White 12:20
Yeah, that was way before you. But we did a show with the director Tom Luddy. And it was a play that had an impossible scenographic environment. And for those of you that aren't in the theater, scenography is the study of all of the environment of the stage in which you put the actors to do their jobs with the words of the script.
So if it was a show like Harvey, the show about the drunk guy who thinks that his best friend is a six foot rabbit, then you're talking about realistic interiors. But even a room in a house is not just a room on the stage. It has to be more than that. Because every movement of the actor has to reinforce, for me anyways, the designer and for any director worth his or her salt, every movement is reflective of what's happening and what the meaning of that moment is.
And so in terms of that, I had to design a set for a pretty impossible show, which basically takes place on the ocean on two different vessels. There's a ghost ship, which is a ship that's filled with dead people. And the second ship in the play comes upon it, and they try and solve the mystery of how everybody got dead.
Because what they find is that everybody is obviously at a wedding ceremony on the main deck. They've been tied to things, so that they won't get washed off the deck after they're dead. And somebody did this, but there's nobody left alive on the ship.
Melissa Milner 14:04
Wow.
Whitney White 14:05
The solution that I came up with was I hung 8,000 pounds of scenery from a single point at the top of the stage off the giant I-beams at the top of a theater building. And I made it move. It swung 360 degrees, it turned 360 degrees either direction, and it looked like the ship was moving all the time that the show was going on.
Melissa Milner 14:32
Wow.
Whitney White 14:33
So that's the kind of thing that I tried to do for my students. Now, you could say that I was a megalomaniac who got unlimited budgets and had free labor, and I could do anything I wanted as an artist. But as you well know, we didn't have an unlimited budget, and I had very few skilled people that could do it, because I was teaching them how to do it as we were doing it.
That was one of the things that any good teacher has to have is not only the height, the strong work ethic, but you've got to be able to exemplify what it is that you want them to do. Now, a lot of times, that's not easy, because how do you exemplify being a mathematician if you're teaching a math class? Well, there are ways. It has to do with how you explain what it is that you want people to know.
One of the reasons that I was famous for my stories was that my feeling was that if I was telling you about how the color of light affected the color of cloth, or scenic paint, or something else, I can show you. And if you were there for that class, you remember that I actually had lights, and gel, and different colors of material. And I showed people what happened, and then I explained why it was happening.
But the key was, how do you use this? What difference does it make for me in the theater? And I would explain things like, I had a show where I had five black actors, and black actors look terrible in pink. And then the custom designer wanted this woman to come out in the middle of the show in this glorious pink dress.
Well, if you're using amber shades to get the color to look correct in the black skin, then when the pink dress comes on, it looks horrible, because there's no pink light reflecting off of it into the audience's eyes. So what did I do? I got a little follow spot, had a wonderful student that was willing to sit up in the catwalks with the follow spot. And this follow spot in pink gel followed that dress around.
So you never saw it on the actor's face. You never saw it on anybody else. You never saw it on a piece of scenery. But that dress glowed pink in the middle of an amber world. A story like that then gets people thinking, well, oh, that's why we need to know this, and that's how I can use this if I ever have a situation or every time I'm looking at the relationship of physical color to light color.
Melissa Milner 17:26
Right, so what I'm hearing is showing it, demonstrating, and then explaining why you need to know what you're doing. In elementary, I know that it would be show and then maybe demonstrate. But then it would maybe be giving the kids flashlights and having the kids do. Because that's how I learned that light board, was by you showing and then doing. That's the only way I learned it.
Whitney White 17:54
Yeah. And it was very strange for me, because typically, if you remember, I used the position of light board operator as a teaching tool for my up and coming lighting designers. So before you ever assisted me in lighting design for a show, you would have to have been a light board operator on at least one show. Because if you don't understand how that light gets manipulated, then how do you know how to manipulate it?
So it's things like that. It's trees of building of learning. It's the way our system is really set up. You can't skip second grade math and then expect to excel in fourth grade math. You have to have gone back and filled that hole with those principles that allow you to understand the more complicated principles in the upper level area.
Melissa Milner 18:52
So you're retired obviously, but what are you zooming in on right now? Because I know you, and I know you're not just sitting back
[ZOOMING IN SOUNDBITE]
Whitney White 19:01
I have to tell you that when you do what I did as I did it, I spent most of my weekends, half of my nights, all my holidays, because remember, a holiday for me meant I didn't have to teach, and I didn't have to do anything with the college. And I could just go in and be a theater person for a weekend or a week if it was a week break.
So much to my wife's chagrin-- she actually used to do funny things. When my kids were real little, she would line them up at the door when she'd call. And I'd say, I'm finally done. I'm gonna come home. And she'd line them up at the door, and I'd walk in. And my daughter, who's a little older than my son, she'd look at my son and she'd go, who's that, Mommy?
Yes, my wife is a kidder just like me. Different kind of humor, but she's a kidder. So when you've done it the way I did it, and you spend all that time, when you're done, I'm kind of done.
Melissa Milner 20:08
Good.
Whitney White 20:09
I have had people ask me to come back and do a scene design here or a lighting design there or something. And I go, well, who's gonna do the work? And they're like, oh, we'll get people, we'll get people. I'm like, no, sorry. I've been in the get people business, and I know that you don't just go out and get people. And if you're not hiring people to do it, then I'm going to end up doing it, and I'm done with that.
Melissa Milner 20:33
Good for you. So what do you do? Do you read? Do you--?
Whitney White 20:36
Oh, I'm a prodigious reader. I have to admit to being something of an old man, because I just love reading westerns. And I think that the reason I do is because they're simple, you know? Some of them aren't. I mean, there are complex westerns. But most of them, there's a simple base, and I like immersing myself. When I read, I try and be in the movie.
Melissa Milner 20:37
Yeah. Me, too.
Whitney White 20:45
I stop seeing words, and the words become images in my mind. And that's really what I love. And after I was doing this for a couple of years after retirement, I was reading one book, and I said, boy, I could write a better fight scene than that.
So I went to the computer, and I just took two characters that I invented in the same kind of scenario that the book had. And I wrote a fight scene, and I read it to myself. And then I went back and I read the book, and I went, damn, I'm good. So I am writing. I have 80 pages of a western written, and I have no intention of selling it or having an editor come and telling me that I don't know what I'm doing. So I am definitely going to just post it when I'm done.
Melissa Milner 22:01
That's awesome. You can self publish.
Whitney White 22:03
I don't-- Yeah, but for what? The only people I care about are my friends. I don't expect people that love westerns to come flocking for some guy that my claim to fame in the West is my mother's from Kansas and I went to school in Kansas, which by the way, had nothing to do with each other.
Melissa Milner 22:22
And you did the True West show.
Whitney White 22:24
Oh, yes. Well, of course, I did True West.
Melissa Milner 22:28
Well, you're keeping busy and using that brain of yours.
Whitney White 22:32
I try. And like I told you before we started, Facebook is my hobby. Now people say, well, do you have a hobby? Yeah, I have Facebook as a hobby. Number one is my birthday gig where I have over 600 students, former students who have birthdays.
And when they pop up, believe it or not, I have a special calendar that I keep track of-- your next birthday, you will not get any of the shows that I have given you before, unless I run out of them. Like if I've given you six birthdays, and you were in the program for six shows, I'll go back to number one again. Because that's the way it is.
Melissa Milner 23:16
That's awesome. So last question for you, my friend, favorite movie, and why?
Whitney White 23:22
All right, I looked at this question, and I thought about it. And I tried to think, how do I say this in terms of education? I have a favorite movie.
Melissa Milner 23:31
Oh, no, it doesn't have to be in terms of education.
Whitney White 23:33
I know it doesn't have to, but your listeners are listening because they're educators, most of them, and so I want to make it a little bit pedagogical. So first of all, let me say, I have a favorite movie in every genre. I can't say that Blade Runner is my favorite movie, because Blade Runner is my favorite cyberpunk. Even more than Matrix, which is another cyberpunk movie, which I love. But to me, it's not as great as Blade Runner, number one.
And then how do you dismiss Star Wars? How do I say that Star Wars wasn't my favorite movie? But if I say Star Wars is my favorite movie, remember, I started watching movies way before Star Wars. And so when I went to see 2001, A Space Odyssey, that was my Star Wars. How do I ignore that, you know? So I thought, and I thought, and I thought.
And then I thought, all right, let me get a little bit pedagogical here, and let me tell you about my first film study class in college. Somebody made a mistake at Marymount College and hired this hippie guy. His wife taught art, and he was in English, and he loved cinema.
He taught me the difference between movies and film. And he made me look at all films for more than just entertainment, because I had never thought of a movie as anything but entertainment. Even though I was getting more, I wasn't thinking about it that way.
So he showed us a movie, and now you're going to have to go see this. I think you can find it for free on YouTube. It's called Woman in the Dunes, and it's a Japanese movie from the early 60s. And there's very little dialogue. All of it was subtitled, which that was another thing, I learned that subtitles are just as good as hearing the voices, sometimes better when the dubbing is terrible.
And it was a story that nothing was real. It was about this desert filled with giant 500 foot deep holes. And at the bottom of each hole was a little shack, and a man and a woman lived at the bottom of each hole. And what they did every day all day was the people up on top would rope buckets down. They would fill the buckets with sand so that the hole didn't fill up. And you never knew why they had to do it. You never knew whether it was a punishment. You never knew anything about it.
It was all about the ideas, and the… the imagery, and the-- oh my god, it changed my life. It changed my life. And it also changed my life about theater, too, because I had never really thought about-- and here's a David George Whizz White argument.
Did Aristotle say that the purpose of theater is to entertain and to cheat teach, which is what David George says. Or was it to teach and entertain? And I am a teach and entertain guy after I saw that movie, because I was totally entertained. I had to watch the thing 10 times. He had rented it on 16 mm movie film, by the way. There was no tape back then.
So I watched the thing 10 or 15 times. It was amazing to me that you could make my mind work the way my mind was working simply by visual images and music and words. It was just amazing.
So Woman in the Dunes changed my life, made everything a dualistic approach to the theater rather than we're thinking about just taking up two hours of people's time so that they have a good time for two hours. I wanted them to think. And if you think back to your starring role as Agnes and that fateful night when I first tried the stigmata effect--
Melissa Milner 27:47
Oh, that was awesome. I still can hear it. I still can hear it. You ready?
[SQUISHING SOUNDS]
That was the sound.
Whitney White 27:53
But you were so perfect, too, because you simply held your hands out. And even though the blood was squishing out like a Kurosawa samurai movie where the blood just shoots-- I mean, I think it hit the first row. But luckily, we were in tech.
But anyway, you just stood there, and you acted as if this was what was supposed to happen. I'll never forget. Tom Luddy was laughing his butt off. It was so funny. But take that. I mean, I could have had a little tiny piece of sponge inside your costume. You could have put your thumb on the sponge, touch the inside of your hands, and we would have seen a little spot of red. But I wanted people to believe that there was something to think about here.
Melissa Milner 28:45
Yes, yes.
Whitney White 28:47
And there's a difference between a spot of red and a drip of blood. And to me, that is what that was all about.
Melissa Milner 28:58
Thank you again, Whizz, for taking the time out to talk to me, and you are the best.
Whitney White 29:07
You make my heart soar like a hawk.
Melissa Milner 29:09
If you enjoyed this episode, and have not done so already, please hit the subscribe button for The Teacher As... podcast so you can get future episodes. I would love for you to leave a review and a rating, as well, if you have time. For my blog, transcripts of this episode and links to any resources mentioned, visit my website at www.theteacheras.com. You can reach me on Twitter and Instagram @melissabmilner. And I hope you check out The Teacher As... Facebook page for episode updates.
I am sending a special thanks to Linda and Lester Fleishman, my mom and dad, for being so supportive. They are the voices you hear in the Zooming In soundbite. And my dad composed and performed the background music you are listening to right now. My intro music was "Upbeat Party" by Scott Holmes.
So what are you zooming in on? I would love to hear from you. My hope is that we all share what we are doing in the classroom in order to teach, remind, affirm and inspire each other. Thanks for listening. And that's a wrap!
Whizz teaching in the Callan Theater at Salem State College, now Salem State University