School Ties

Two education docs feature local instructors asking their kids to think outside the box.

by Sam Adams

Pressure Cooker

You know the formula: Caring and/or strict teacher takes on class of underprivileged or just understimulated students and opens up the world of knowledge. But in real life, things rarely go so smoothly, as the films in this year's Philadelphia Film Festival/Cinefest make plain. Whether in the wilds of Frankford or sleepy Lancaster, the educators in this year's movies are constantly negotiating between the goals of the classroom and the exigencies of the outside world, and sometimes the best they can do is a tenuous compromise.

Wilma Stephenson, who teaches culinary arts at Frankford High, begins the documentary Pressure Cooker with her take on the Paper Chase speech: "Everything you've heard is true," she tells a class of apprehensive seniors, "only it's worse than that." A tense and sometimes terrifying figure, Stephenson lashes out at students who make careless mistakes, and can be positively scorching with those who fail to show the proper respect to her or her kitchen. "She has good intentions," says Erica, one of three students the movie focuses on. "Just sometimes she has bad people skills."

As her warning suggests, Miss Stephenson's reputation precedes her. "They pretty much know what they're in for," she said last week, driving back from the annual competition that helps determine which students will receive scholarships to places like the Culinary Institute of America. "If I were a kid, I would really think before I took my class."

But for all her sternness, Stephenson can be remarkably supportive, within the classroom and without. She ensures that Erica has a date to the senior prom and even helps her pick out a dress, and counsels Fatoumata, a recent Malian immigrant, on balancing the demands of school with those of her unsupportive father, who places more importance on her doing housework than getting an education.

The results speak for themselves. At a school where the dropout rate hovers around 40 percent, her students regularly place among the top in scholarships, in part because she seeks out the exceptional ones and advises them that a culinary scholarship could be their ticket to a college education. "It's not that I'm pushing for culinary arts," she said. "I'm pushing so that they will go on and do something so they can be self-sufficient, and to know that they can make it. If they can survive my class, they can survive life."

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Stephenson's class is part of the Careers Through Culinary Arts program, founded by Pressure Cooker co-director Jennifer Grausman's father, Richard, as a way of teaching practical skills to underserved high school students in more than a dozen locations nationwide. The children in The Sitting Machine aren't quite ready for career skills, being all of fifth-graders. But to hear Jerry Greiner, the documentary's co-producer and the creator of the Sitting Machine Project, tell it, the results can be no less far-reaching. "Kids just love doing it," said Greiner, on the phone from his home in Lancaster. "When they come out the other side, they are different."

Greiner, whose background is in design, came up with the project in 1995 as a way of bringing his own skills to bear in a classroom setting. The idea is simple: Have children conceive, design and execute a fully functional chair, using only corrugated cardboard and glue. But the process of going from vague idea to concrete object is something, he says, the children have rarely experienced before.

"I think that process is part of everyone's life, and they do not realize it," he said. "It's a step-by-step way of getting from something that is barely a few lines on a napkin to something that is real in the world."

Greiner concedes that the idea of having children build something is not new. But what is different is the extent to which they're encouraged to rethink the very idea of what a "sitting machine" should accomplish. Some of the children at Rheems Elementary, where the project was revived after the school where Greiner developed the idea closed, create facsimiles of dining room chairs, while others design fantastic creations that function as their own miniature worlds. Megan, a bright-eyed but tentative girl, produces sketches full of swirls that seem as unwieldy as they are impractical, but her construct is perhaps the class's most imaginative.

The key, Greiner says, is not assuming built-in limitations on the part of the children. Rather than designing a project tailored to the perceived interests of fifth-graders, he took the idea from a class he'd been teaching to engineering students. "I took a course that was being taught to college juniors, and modified it to be applicable to 10-year-olds," he said.

Although they're years and miles apart, the students of Pressure Cooker and The Sitting Machine emerge at the end of their films with a similar sense of self-possession, and an expanded sense of their own capabilities. Not the kind of lesson you'll find on any syllabus, but it's something the students are likely to remember long after they've forgotten their algebra lessons.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Pressure Cooker screens Sat., March 28, 6:30 p.m., at Prince Music Theater; Sun., March 29, 4:45 p.m., at Ritz East; and Sat., April 4, 7 p.m., at Black Box at the Prince. The movie is scheduled to open at the Ritz at the Bourse on June 29.

The Sitting Machine screens Sun., March 29, 4:30 p.m., at International House.

Directors and subjects are scheduled to attend all screenings.