Program
When I Get Inside, Kenny Carr and the Tigers
Welcoming: Jocelyn Sanders, Master of Ceremonies
Bill Ayers will discuss the importance of teacher celebrations.
Aileena Roberts will give thanks to Ms. Tiffany Smith from Rosewood Elementary School, Richland School District One.
Yes, Kenny Carr and the Tigers
Rhett Jackson will give thanks to Dr. Frank B. Herty of the University of South Carolina.
Claudia Smith Brinson will give thanks to Mrs. Fuji of Radford High School.
Yes Lord, Kenny Carr and the Tigers
Traci Young Cooper will give thanks to Madam Lilease Hall
of Columbia High School, Richland School District One.
Heaven, Kenny Carr and the Tigers
Avery Golston will give thanks to Ms. Donna McKenna-Crook of A. C. Flora High School, Richland School District One.
Jo Anne Anderson will give thanks to Gladys Hammond of Madison St. Junior High.
How I Got Over, Kenny Carr and the Tigers
Craig Melvin will give thanks to Doug Brandon of Rosewood Elementary School, Richland
School District One, and Michael Fanning of the Olde English Consortium, Rock Hill.
Know I Love the Lord, Kenny Carr and the Tigers
Presenters
Jo Anne Anderson is Executive Director of the S.C. Education Oversight Committee.
Bill Ayers is Professor of Education at University of Illinois-Chicago.
Claudia Smith Brinson is the Features Columnist and Book Editor for The State.
Traci Young Cooper is an assistant principal at Alcorn Middle School, Richland School District One.
Avery Golston is an 11th grade student at A. C. Flora High School, Richland School District One.
Rhett Jackson is owner emeritus of The Happy Bookseller bookstore.
Craig Melvin is a news anchor on WIS News Live at 5, News at 6, and Nightcast.
Aileena Roberts is a 5th grade student at Rosewood Elementary School, Richland School District One.
Jocelyn Sanders, our Carolina Shout MC, is well known to Columbia audiences as an
actor, director, and staff member at Trustus Theatre.
Reflections: Carolina SHOUT: Act III by Bill Ayers
The drama of education is always a narrative of change. Act I is life as we find it—the
given, the known or the received, the already settled and assumed, the status quo.
But there’s always something more to do, something more to learn and to know, something
more to experience and accomplish. Act II is the fireworks, the wild upheaval and
the crazy dissonance, the vast experience of discovery and surprise, the intense energy
of remodeling and refashioning. Act III is the achievement of an altered angle of
regard, new ways of knowing and behaving, a different way of seeing and being. Transformation.
Act III, of course, will one day be recast as a new Act I, and the never-ending journey
toward the new will begin again. Teaching changes lives.
This sense of growth and change, learning and transformation, fireworks and upheaval,
was on full display at the 2006 CAROLINA SHOUT! This was Act III, and it channeled
all the love and hope, all the hugs and tears from Acts I and II, with some spice
and flavor—like any home-cooked meal—all its own.
Kenny Carr and the Tigers, founding partners, co-authors and co-conspirators with
Craig Kridel in this most unique and uplifting testimonial to teachers, have become
pit orchestra and indispensable cultural marker for the SHOUT. When Kenny hit it,
the line of horns came blasting to life, and everyone leapt up, our spirits rising
in righteous appreciation. It was a joy to behold. Ten-year-old Aileene R. shouted
out with remarkable poise and grace for her teacher Ms. Tiffany Smith, whose tiny
baby son Jeremiah stole the show as well as the hearts of those of us who took turns
holding him during the proceedings. Traci Young Cooper, South Carolina Teacher of
the Year in 2001, honored her Columbia High School French teacher, Madame Lilease
Hall, this diminutive yet regal presence who “opened worlds to us,” and believed that
her students could overcome any barriers to their dreams. And Craig Melvin, WIS news
anchor, thanked Doug Brandon and Michael Fanning for never giving up on kids, and
for creating idiosyncratic environments that were filled with interesting, provocative,
and nourishing opportunities to learn, and kept him engaged in spite of his predilections
to do otherwise.
A sense of opportunity and renewal—for individuals, for whole communities and societies—was
at the heart of it all, the ineffable magic drawing our spirits back to the classroom
and the school again and again. Like these students and their teachers, we felt ourselves
becoming more powerfully and self-consciously alive, challenged toward further knowledge,
enlightenment, and human community, toward liberation.
Here was a faith that every child and every student and every teacher as well comes
as a whole and multidimensional being—a gooey biological wonder, pulsing with the
breath and beat of life itself, evolved and evolving, shaped by genetics, twisted
and gnarled by the unique experiences of living. Each has as well a complex set of
circumstances that makes his or her life understandable and sensible, bearable or
unbearable. Each is unique, each walks a singular path across the earth, each has
a mother and a father, each with a distinct mark to be made, and each is somehow sacred.
That insight, that understanding is something worth shouting about.
SHOUT!