The Globe and Mail

One teacher’s quixotic quest to transform how kids learn

JEFFREY CANTON

SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2, 2020

It’s hard to know how to describe Stephen Haff’s book, Kid Quixotes, because it’s about so many things: the plight of refugees in the U.S., education, gender identity, bilingualism, mental illness, theatre, social justice.

Mostly, though, it’s about the work of the writer himself. Haff was raised in Waterloo, Ont., graduated from New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University, and has quietly worked for more than a decade to create a unique program in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighbourhood to help kids practice reading and writing in English, Spanish and Latin.

“Many of these kids are children of undocumented Mexican and Ecuadorian refugees,” says Haff in a Zoom interview from his home on Long Island, “living in constant fear of deportation.”

But under Haff’s gentle tutelage, the kids (aged 6 to 17) find their own voices by translating classic literature like Milton’s Paradise Lost into present-day vernacular. Haff’s book beautifully recreates the collaborative conversations between him and his students (drawn from boxes and boxes of detailed notes) as they painstakingly try to work out which words will best capture the spirit of each piece. For Cervantes’s Don Quixote, they made a list of 50 different English words for “boss” or “money” in search of the most accurate translation from the Spanish. This past summer’s project was Virgil’s epic poem The Aenid, which the kids transformed into a piece of choral music modelled on Handel’s Messiah.

Haff created the program 13 years ago and calls it “the sanctuary I built following a breakdown caused by bipolar depression.” It’s also a refuge for the kids who attend – it was christened Still Waters in a Storm by a former student at Bushwick High School, where Haff was once a teacher.

Over the years, Still Waters has attracted a roster of international writers – among them Salman Rushdie, Valeria Luiselli, George F. Walker, Mary Gaitskill, Michael Ondaatje, Zadie Smith, Peter Carey, Claire Messud and Jonathan Safran Foer – who visit the school to read their own work and help the kids with their own writing projects. What makes this so magical, says Haff in the book, is that the kids often don’t know who these writers are, so there is no awe or shyness. Instead, they’re simply adults who share their love of reading and writing – and are willing to listen to what the kids are doing, too.

“At Still Waters,” Haff says quietly, “we have all agreed that there is only one rule: ‘Everyone listens to everyone,’ – a simple yet challenging algorithm for egalitarian co-operation in any setting. And this has unlocked spectacular potential.”

The book focuses on a project that Still Waters has been working on for the past four years: the development of the bilingual musical The Traveling Serialized Adventures of Kid Quixote, collaboratively written by the kids themselves (with the help of composer Kim Sherman). Haff says they’ve performed it all across New York and beyond, “in the living rooms of the rich and poor,” on college campuses, and even in government offices, including various consulates and at New York City Hall. “They’ve learned that they belong, in any neighbourhood, and in the worlds of higher education and civic power,” says Haff. “And, most importantly, they belong in this country.”

That’s been a major issue since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which “plunged these children’s families into terror,” says Haff. That’s why he chose Don Quixote as the basis for the musical project, which is expected to take five years to complete. This, he writes in the book, is “a story about a dreamer whose love of books drives him to want to rescue the needy and defend the defenseless (as do the kids), and their bilingual musical has become a vessel for both their own stories and those of their parents.”

The musical also provided a perfect structure for the book. “It allowed me to tell the stories of these amazing kids,” he says. Sarah, an extremely shy six-year old who plays the musical’s title role, Kid Quixote, finds a fantastical way to tell the story of how her mother came to the U.S., imagining her journey across the desert from Mexico on the back of a tiger. (To balance Sarah’s version, Haff makes a place for Sarah’s mother, Maggie, to tell her story in the book, as well.) Another character drawn from Haff’s real-life class is Percy, whose nose is always in a book (usually not the one that he’s supposed to be reading) and whose quips and wordplay delight his fellow adventurers. Alex, a very private teenager who has been attending Still Waters for 10 years, shares the deeply emotional journey she and her fellow Kid Quixotes slowly transforming a moving essay she’d written about coming out it into the lyrics of a song that enables her to come out to her parents.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m only being heard at Still Waters,” Alex, now 17, tells me in an e-mail. “It has taught me to never be afraid to take a chance on new people, to speak my mind or from my heart. Now, I am confident in my identity. I am confident enough to speak up against injustice.”

More than a book about one project, Kid Quixote is also about Haff’s creative approach to learning. “I like to think of the book as a plan for justice via education,” he says. “I tell people that growing up in Canada shaped my values, my desire to include everyone, to make sure everyone has enough.”

Haff knows the kids he’s working with understand just how important that is – which is why he made sure their voices fill the pages of his book. “Their fellow refugees are suffering worse than ever in detention because their stories have been bumped from the headlines by the pandemic,” he says. The Kid Quixotes, in turn, made sure to include some of those voices in the musical, via letters they exchanged with girls being held in an ICE detention centre.

While the pandemic has changed how Haff interacts with the Still Waters kids, his physical school having closed because of the pandemic, they’re gearing up for a busy fall. The team is still working on Kid Quixote musical. “We’re in the middle of writing a song called ‘The Nightmare Song,’ based on a scene in the novel where the heroes hear loud noises in the dark of night and are scared,” says Haff. After that, they have at least one more song to go, plus some translation and dialogue adaptation. As for when they’ll actually debut the show to an audience, he says, “we’ve experimented with various performance ideas on Zoom, but I think we’re going to wait until we can rehearse in person.”

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