Learn Me Somethin'

Learn Me Somethin', a hilarious, provocative satire, tells the story of Jameson Jones and his mother, who earnestly believe in school as a place to learn, but nonetheless find themselves propelled through a wonderland of scary officials, bizarre classrooms and inscrutable committee meetings. Students march in their desks to a class where they are sorted willy-nilly into "front-brained" and "back-brained" groups; a math teacher (who wears an overhead projector) is so beset by a complete turnover of students coming and going that he can't even present one simple proposition; the school board suffers from ADD; the FARCE Committee (Faculty and Administration Redesign for Community Empowerment) gives unanimous approval to propositions that have no verbs; politicians pontificate about a phoney-baloney joint venture in education while fighting over a plateful of shrimp. When young Jones makes an observation in math class, he triggers an impromptu experiment. Wire and ribbon are strung high and low across the classroom producing, to everyone's surprise, an elegant parallelogram, shimmering in space, bringing order out of chaos for one brief, lovely moment—which ends when the dean barges in. This play makes teachers, parents, students—and even administrators—laugh and weep at the truth laid bare!