Forensics teacher Tommie Lindsey.
Pattie Mae, a black woman living in the Deep South, is torn between love and her desire to see the world. "I've outgrown the Crossroads and I've also outgrown you," she tells her boyfriend, Cephus, a farmer. "I can't grow here. A person has to better themselves."
"You were born in a dusty old farmhouse," Cephus reminds her.
As she leaves for the city, he forlornly tells the audience of fellow students, "I'll never love another girl. She's my soft summer girl."
Later, a divorced and humbled Pattie Mae heads for home - and Cephus. "I'm back in the Crossroads and my thoughts are of you," she says, eyes shining. "The child who fled North to the Promised Land is going home."
This highly emotional and perfectly timed presentation by students Latoyia Johnson and Pierre Clark combines elements of speech, debate and dramatic interpretation in the academic sport of forensics.
Forensics is usually practiced at elite private schools or high schools attended by affluent students. However, Johnson and Clark's heartfelt performance of a selection from the play
Home
takes place in Room 408 of James Logan High School in Union City. It is an urban school where many of the students are poor and live in single-parent homes.
Di'Jonn Grizzell and Cherie Murphy in their dramatic interpretation at Logan High School in Union City.
New Haven Teachers Association member Tommie Lindsey teaches forensics in Room 408. But he teaches a great deal more. Through forensics, he teaches students to believe in themselves. He teaches them to win state and national competitions. He teaches them to value and pursue higher education. In fact nearly 100 percent of his forensics students go on to four-year colleges - many of them receiving full scholarships. Some of his students are the first in their families to graduate from high school, let alone attend college.
"My expectations are very, very high," says Lindsey. "If I was someone else and had to get along with me, I'd find it very, very difficult. I have very high standards and my students have to work extremely hard to live up to my expectations."
But students do their best to live up to Lindsey's expectations. The 240 members of the forensics team practice during lunch, after school and on weekends. They give Lindsey their all. And they also give up negative behavior that threatens their success.
Lindsey's classroom walls are covered with awards earned by students who were pushed to do their personal best. His team has won the School of Excellence Award for the past three years in national forensics competitions, in addition to four state championships in the last seven years.
The achievements of his students have motivated them to perform well in their other classes - and think about the future - as well.
"I was pushed into college," says one of his former students. "If not for Mr. Lindsey, I don't know where I'd be now. I was a really big, bad kid."
"Mr. Lindsey is like a father figure to us," says Amber Johnson. "A lot of us don't have fathers, so he compensates. It means a lot to us. He tries to teach us moral values and cares about us. He shows us how to succeed in life. He makes us care."
Lindsey can identify with his students. He was so poor growing up that his clothes had holes in them. When one of his teachers took him shopping for new pants, Lindsey decided that he would become a teacher so that he, too, could help students. Sometimes he takes his students shopping for clothes before competitions.
He encourages his students to draw on their cultural backgrounds - sometimes pent-up anger or pain - and channel their feelings into spellbinding interpretations. By instilling poise and self-confidence in his students - and giving them the motivation and opportunity to use these skills to win state and national awards - Lindsey changes the course of their lives and how they view themselves and the world.
His students have a reputation for excellence and often beat out students from elite private schools. However, competitions can be bittersweet. While it's satisfying to break down the stereotypes about students of color by winning, it can be painful to encounter students who are condescending.
"Sometimes people make fun of us at competitions and say, 'Oh, you're from Logan,' in a certain voice," says Latoyia Johnson, who competed in Charlotte, N.C., for the nationals in June with her forensics partner. "I try not to let it get to me."
Lindsey and his students were the subject of a PBS documentary that aired in September, Accidental Hero: Room 408, produced by filmmakers Terri DeBono and Steve Rosen. (Associate producer Sandra Jackson is a media-relations consultant for CTA.) The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour recently broadcast a segment that showed Lindsey's students gearing up - and competing - in the statewide competition.
Lindsey says he is proud of his students, whether they are in the limelight or not. By teaching his students what it takes to become champions, Lindsey ignites something even more powerful within his students - the light of knowledge and belief in themselves.
