In the still of the morning, before lessons begin, Mark Moran is stalking about the classroom that he will soon transform into a stage.
Using one motion, he disturbs a stack of papers, cants his head at notes neatly written on a chalkboard and cracks a joke about the day of performance that lies ahead.
If any stage fright visits him in these moments, before his audience floats in, Moran doesn’t show it.
“Yes, I usually like to say a prayer right about now,” the boy-next-door-looking Moran says with mock gusto.
This is because, in a city with an overabundance of tough teaching gigs, Moran, 29, is about to immerse himself in one of the toughest, as teacher of the itinerant and troubled children who stay at the Columbus/Maryville Children’s Reception Center in Uptown.
Before Moran are brought the raped and prostituted, the beaten and neglected children of whom the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has taken custody.
The students range widely in age, are of various educational levels and stay for such varied amounts of time that even the most volatile Chicago public schools may look stable by comparison.
But despite these handicaps and his students’ personal demons, Moran, a graduate student in education at DePaul University and an aspiring amateur actor who once flirted with the priesthood, doesn’t coddle the youth.
“I don’t play that victim game,” Moran says of his insistence that any child can learn.
So when they enter his classroom, a carpeted concrete space adorned with liberal iconography, the students, some of whom can scarcely read, are met with complex works of some of the great authors, such as Tennessee Williams and William Shakespeare.
They also are met with an instructor who soothes the swallowing of the educational castor oil with his improvisational abilities, derived from his acting hobby.
Later in the day, for example, Moran hands out a paper with phrases that students are supposed to translate into proper English.
“I like to `Jones’ them with this dialect,” Moran says, using the slang for “kid” to explain what he does to his students, a vast majority of whom are African-American. On the paper is written: “I ain’t going out like that.” In Moran’s street-tinged mimickry, it comes out, “I AYN goan oud lye DAT.”
The three young girls in the classroom titter in recognition. One explains, correctly, that the phrase should mean that “I’m not going to let you do that to me.”
Later, Moran explains his technique: “Everything changes so much here, you have to teach like a standup comedian. Teaching here is charisma-based, personality-based, since this is not a regular school.”
There are usually some 75 elementary- through high school-age children at the center, 810 W. Montrose Ave., for whom the school within tries to cobble together a semblance of normalcy. On any given day, students could be taken to court to testify against their parents, to a clinic to receive rape counseling or to a foster family with whom to live.
The school, a branch of Brennemann Elementary School, was begun more than seven years ago at the shelter, which is managed by Catholic Charities under a contract with the state. Before this, the children at the shelter were generally idle, “like in a holding pen,” head teacher Joyce Wdowik says.
Although a small number of students are taught at any given time by the six-teacher staff, some 1,800 pass through the school each year, and one-third of them will return to the shelter.
So what Moran and the other teachers end up with are children in class for periods as short as a day and sometimes longer than six months.
For example, into Moran’s classroom today will walk a 13-year-old boy beaten bloody with an extension cord who was raped by his mother’s boyfriend; a 15-year-old girl from an impoverished single-parent home whose emotional problems made her uncontrollable; and a 12-year-old boy whose sickle cell anemia and asthma were ignored by his parents to the point that he was collapsing at school.
Moran, who came to the job as a temp and decided to stay, fits the profile of those others who accept the difficult assignment at the school, Wdowik says.
“Teachers here really have to want to be here,” Wdowik says. “They have to be creative.”
Later that day, proving this point, Moran’s clipped voice will descend in pulses over the children, making some of them retreat even further into quiet. Still others respond to his lively impromptu, and for a moment anyway, their dark eyes will light up.
Moran is explaining how the 7th Century Ghanaian empire controlled trade, to a dozing morning class of six boys and two of the “adult educators” who must always accompany the shelter children.
“(The Ghanaians) stopped the Muslims, who were coming from all over,” he says loudly, using animated gestures and hopping over to the classroom door, “and now they all had to come through here–the front door.”
A glint of recognition flashes in the class as it awakes and Moran makes some jokes about camels.
He describes his act as navigating, since he does not know–and chooses not to find out in much detail–what emotional shoals he has to negotiate from day to day.
“One minute the lesson’s going fine,” he says. “The other minute the ship has sunk. Another time, out of nowhere, for what seems like no particular reason, the kid has written this amazing thought.”
Just a few minutes after he says this, though, the ship is sinking.
In a read of Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” Moran is trying to relate to the class a scene where a central character, Tom Wingfield, is asked by his mother to find a suitor for his sister.
One girl, in particular, is gaining momentum in her reading, prodded by Moran, as she plays the part of the mother. When they stop, Moran asks the class, “Is there anything special that you look for in a friend? . . . I asked a girl to marry me once. I bought her one of those plastic rings from Target.”
But one of the girls arrests the playful mode of the questioning by declaring, “I have no friends.”
Moran recovers from the moment of silence that follows by telling yet another joke: “You know, there are a lot of people in Lincoln Park with extra money. I teach social studies to their children to put them to sleep.” The girls giggle. The lesson continues.
This is his first teaching assignment. He took it on more than two years ago while receiving his teaching certificate from DePaul, where he is completing his master’s degree in education. He has been in Chicago for five years, after growing up and completing an undergraduate degree in the Baltimore area.
Moran fiddled with improvisational acting when he first arrived here and continues his career, playing the part of a tempted seminarian in “The Devil’s Familiar,” a show playing through Nov. 7 at the Griffin Theatre, 5404 N. Clark St.
But, spurred by the enjoyment that he says he got out of coaching when he was younger and by the connections he says he is able to make with the students he sees daily, Moran now considers teaching his primary profession.
Besides, he says, before going off to lunch, “I get a lot of acting practice here.”
