Lisa Houston

PROFILES IN EDUCATION

Candace Braun

Name: Lisa Houston
School: The Pennington School
Years Taught: nine years
Subject/Grade Taught: drama director for grades 6th through 12th
Education: Princeton High School; bachelor's degree in English and theater, Barnard College, NY
Most Memorable Book: The Open Door, by Peter Brook
Person You Admire: "My aunt, Helen Mack, who is a teacher of gifted students and a cancer survivor. She has given me a lot of advice over the years and has great strength and determination."

The best way to be a good teacher is to be there for your students as much as possible. At least that's the case for Lisa Houston, the drama director at the Pennington School, who not only spends her school days teaching classes and her afternoons in play rehearsal, but lives on campus as a dorm parent for upper school boys.

Ms. Houston jump-started the drama program at the private school, which did not have any drama classes and very few drama performances when she arrived nine years ago. Beginning with no equipment, lighting, or stage area, the drama program at Pennington is now so big that the school recently built a media center with a studio to be specifically used by Ms. Houston and her students.

"My first students knew what it was like to not have drama, and then to see what it was like to have it as part of their daily school life," she said. "Now it's totally a part of the culture of the school...Students have been able to pass that down to one another over the years."

While admitting to being a drama teacher, but not an actress, the Princeton native has been exposed to theater since she was a child, when her parents would take her and her younger sister to Broadway shows, as well as many of the plays performed at Washington Crossing and McCarter Theatre.

However, it was her sister, Suzanne, who was more interested in becoming an actress. After teaching drama at John Witherspoon Middle School for three years, her sister is now pursuing a professional career in acting.

Ms. Houston, who was undecided about a career, began taking more of an interest in theater at Barnard College, where she had a work-study job in the theater department. As she gradually took more classes and made more friends in the field, she found herself majoring in it. Working in more than a dozen shows her senior year at Barnard, she began to feel overloaded, but after taking some time off and then briefly working at an interior design company in Princeton, she realized that theater was the only place she could be as creative as she wanted to be.

A Life of Teaching

After applying for the advertised position at the Pennington School, Ms. Houston started out as a part-time drama teacher and hall parent in the school's dorms for the students who board there.

"When you're a young, single teacher at a boarding school, your whole life is the school and kids," she said, adding that keeping up with all her commitments at work has become much more difficult now that she's married and has two kids. It helps that her husband, Jason Harding, works part-time as a Native American History teacher at the school. Besides sharing the parental duties throughout the day, he helps with the lighting and technical equipment for the school's productions.

"It's a big balancing act. It's been hard the last few years," she said, adding that along with directing both the fall play and winter musical, she teaches five classes per day, including middle school drama and public speaking, advanced drama, technical drama, a senior drama seminar, a Shakespeare course, and Art-O-Rama, a combined art and drama course.

Ms. Houston thinks that what makes her teaching stand out is her determination to get to know each student as an individual during the six years she teaches them. Tying classroom exercises to outside interests of the students, many of whom participate in up to three sports, helps them relate the course to their daily lives.

"Drama is a personal subject; it's about you and putting yourself into someone else's perspective...You have to get into their hearts and minds and figure out how you can help them be the best they can be."

Ms. Houston said she believes many of her "lost" students find their muse in theater, giving them the confidence to move forward with their goals: "[Confidence] can only make you a better student, a better person. Even if that's the only thing you get out of one of the courses I teach, or plays I direct, it's a really important life lesson."

She has already sent some of her students on the right course by helping them audition for acting programs at colleges such as New York University, Syracuse University, or The College of Santa Fe.

The Play's The Thing

The after-school productions are Ms. Houston's main priority, because she feels her students get the most out of that experience: "I want to make the shows the best they can be and I want the kids to feel that they're doing the best they can."

This fall her students performed The Laramie Project, based on the story of Matthew Shepherd, the gay University of Wyoming student who was murdered.

"The subject matter is pretty sensitive for high school and for this day and age, with politics the way they are...I thought it was very timely," she said, adding that to relate the play to the students' education she had programs to go along with it, including training for the actors in sensitivity and tolerance by the Anti-Defamation League.

Leadership programs at the school also studied the meaning behind the play, and the acting group held a "talk back" discussion for students following one of its productions. Romaine Patterson, a friend of Mr. Shepherd's who was featured in the play, also came to the school to speak to the entire student body.

"The play was a life-changing event for me and the students directly involved, but also for the parents and other faculty and students who were really moved by what the play brought forth," said Ms. Houston.

The moment she truly realized how important her position is at the school was when she was working on the winter musical this past school year. When her now 10-month-old daughter came a month early, she had to be hospitalized a week before her students were due to perform at a drama festival at Rider University. Although other faculty members rehearsed the actors and took them to the competition, the students seemed less confident without their drama teacher.

At the last minute, Ms. Houston was able to go to the show, watching in the audience as her students won the competition: "I don't think they realized how important I was to them until the moment I couldn't be there."