Four Texas teachers transport their students to 1980s Hawkins, Indiana where they encounter demogorgons, the Upside Down, and a newfound confidence in their studies. This week’s essay is read by Cara Buono, who plays Karen Wheeler in Stranger Things.
MR. CLARKE: Hello?
DUSTIN: Mr. Clarke? It’s Dustin.
MR. CLARKE: Dustin, is everything okay?
DUSTIN: Yeah yeah, I just, I...I have a science question.
MR. CLARKE: It’s ten o’clock on Saturday. Why don’t we pick this up on-
DUSTIN: Do you know anything about sensory deprivation tanks? Specifically how to build one?
MR. CLARKE: Sensory deprivation? Wh-what is this for?
DUSTIN: Fun.
MR. CLARKE: Okay. Well, Why don’t we talk about it Monday, after school, okay?
DUSTIN: You always say we should never stop being curious, to always open every curiosity door we find.
MR. CLARKE: Dustin-
DUSTIN: Why are you keeping this curiosity door locked?!
MS. BUENO: We had shirts made actually for STARR day, so we had all of us who were in this um Stranger Things transformation. So, our shirts said ‘Why be a 10 when you can be an 11?’
MEREDITH: My mother was a teacher - a piano teacher and sometimes it wasn’t east to get kids interested in classical music. But I learned she had this trick. She knew that if she played them a movie, it might spark their interest. Like when Twilight came out, every one of her students wanted to play Claire de Lune, just like the magnificent Edward. And if kids couldn't understand the importance of score she’d play them Star Wars bc doesn’t John Williams’ music say everything?
Today, we’re following a group of teachers who went above and beyond to show their students that the things we love can help us learn, by transporting their school back to 1983 Hawkins, Indiana.
I’m Meredith Goldstein, advice-columnist for the Boston Globe, host of the Love Letters podcast, and avid television watcher. And this is Because I Watched: A podcast exploring how real people’s stories have been changed thanks to their favorite Netflix shows and movies.
Today we will hear the true story of four teachers with one goal and a collective love of Stranger Things. This essay is written by Sara Benincasa and read by Cara Bono, who plays Mike’s mom, Karen Wheeler, on the show.
CARA: Great teachers don’t phone it in. They can’t. When it comes to their students, it’s somehow impossible for great teachers to do anything halfway. When you talk to them, a lot of them will tell you it’s a calling. Others will say it’s in their blood.
Sure, great teachers get tired. Some of them even consider giving up. After all, they’re human beings who are too often called upon to summon superhuman strength: patience, willpower, creativity, patience, energy, patience, hope – did I mention patience?
But maybe that’s what makes them real-life heroes: their willingness to give far more than what others would consider probable, or even possible.
This is a story about a small group of real life superheroes from Odessa, Texas who went above and beyond the call of duty to make sure their fifth graders would be prepared to do well on a very big, and very important standardized test - the kind that could determine not just the future of the students who take it, but the future of the school itself. These teachers weren’t just fighting for their students - they were fighting for themselves. So naturally, they used the finest educational tool they could think of – Stranger Things.
Five years ago, San Jacinto Elementary School was deemed the lowest performing school in its district by a variety of measurements. Their standardized test scores in particular were really bad. Testing is serious business in Texas, where schools are grouped according to how well they score. The top performers get accolades and lots of praise. The low performers…don’t. Schools are scored from A to F, and San Jacinto was at the bottom of the barrel. Fewer students graduate from low-performing schools - which means very few will make it to college or further professional training, which, in turn, leads to lower wages and a dimmer economic future for these kids - and eventually, for their own families.
CARA: At San Jacinto, 80% of the students are economically disadvantaged. Most of their parents don’t have the money to invest in special tutoring, expensive extracurricular activities, or elaborate summer enrichment camps – the kind of stuff that can help wealthier students improve in school. And they certainly don’t have a lot of spare cash to throw around on things that more affluent families take for granted, like the most advanced laptops and tablets.
But there’s one thing San Jacinto did have going for it: great teachers. Real life superheroes.
Carnisha Brown, the fifth grade science teacher, had become a teacher after acquiring two college degrees and realizing she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her professional life. Her mother suggested teaching was the right path, and indeed it was. San Jacinto had been her first teaching gig - she loved that it was a place where she could use her creativity in a way that really mattered.
Christine Carrillo also came to teaching with an unusual path. She taught math at San Jacinto, but in a previous life, she’d studied business management and worked in banking for ten years. When she had a son, she wanted a career where she could be more available to him outside of traditional office hours. And after awhile, every day in banking had started to feel like the same old drill. She’d always been great at training new hires, so she got her teaching certification, and moved to Odessa specifically because of the high demand for new teachers.
Ms. Carrillo fell in love with teaching, and the students of San Jacinto. She saw that some students at San Jacinto came in broken, defeated and lost, but that she could be a part of building them back up. Some days she was overwhelmed by the magnitude of her task, but her faith informed her belief that this was all part of a bigger plan. She felt in her bones that her job was to work with the other teachers to build these students up, and push them beyond any expectations. To reach the unimaginable.
After getting that low grade in the round of testing, Ms. Brown, Ms. Carrillo, and the dedicated staff at San Jacinto were determined to make the school a lot better. Over the next five years, the teachers and administration made major changes, including a particularly innovative method pioneered by the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, Georgia.
Which, coincidentally happens to be the city where Stranger Things seasons one, two and three were filmed. But we’ll get back to the show in a moment.
CARA: 1100 miles away from San Jacinto Elementary, the Ron Clark Academy is a famous nonprofit “demonstration school.” It’s a place where teachers visit to observe master teachers in action. At last count, educators from 22 different countries around the world had made a pilgrimage to the Ron Clark Academy - including the teachers from San Jacinto Elementary. The team was wowed by a technique they learned at the Academy called “a classroom transformation,” where teachers create immersive experiences designed to get students so excited about a particular topic or theme that they can’t help but learn.
Imagine science is your least favorite subject in school, because your science teacher isn’t as extremely, unbelievably, totally awesome as, for example, Hawkins, Indiana’s own Scott Clarke. You probably dread going to science class, where all you do is read dry facts about photosynthesis and plant life in a textbook, and feel bored to death as your joyless teacher drones on and on and on. You don’t want to be there, and you’re pretty sure your teacher doesn’t, either.
Now, imagine that one day, you walk into your science classroom and discover a dense pine forest right out of the Pacific Northwest. Magically, there’s a forest canopy overhead. Your teachers are in costume – maybe as forest rangers, maybe as actual plants themselves – and they’re excited to see you and to tell you what they know. It’s a little bit goofy, but that’s the point – it’s silly and fun and it’s actually interesting. The rangers and plants encourage you to learn with cool, creative hands-on assignments where you can see, hear, smell, touch and maybe even taste the subject of your science lessons. Wouldn’t you be more likely to remember the names of specific trees if they were suddenly standing right in your classroom (even if they were made out of papier mache)?
That’s a classroom transformation. Take a topic, make it fun, make it weird, make it unforgettable. And like thousands of teachers around the world, the San Jacinto Elementary educators who visited the Ron Clark Academy fell in love with the method. They brought it back to Odessa, and started using it to amp up the fifth graders a couple of times a year. Curious fourth graders began to whisper that something really cool was going on in Ms. Brown’s science classroom, and in Ms. Carrillo’s math classroom. Rumors spread about what the next transformation would be, and when it would happen. And lo and behold, test scores at San Jacinto Elementary started rising.
CARA: In the fall of 2018, expectations for the upcoming spring test were higher than ever before. The school wasn’t at the bottom of the barrel like it had been five years ago, but the staff really needed to up their game in order to be counted among the better schools in their district. The teachers knew they had to do something really cool to get the fifth graders extra excited and extra motivated. But what?
Enter Carnisha Brown and Christine Carrillo.
Even the greatest teachers, the hardest workers, the conjurers of miracles, need a way to blow off steam. Across the nation, public school teacher burnout is real, and leads a lot of first year teachers to quit. The ones who keep going have to find ways to relax and enjoy their downtime. And it’s no surprise that Ms. Carrillo, the dreamer of very big dreams, became a Stranger Things fan soon after the first season came out.
She soon found a buddy in Ms. Brown, who’d loved it before the buzz spread to seemingly everybody else in the entire world. She binged the first season on Netflix right away, and couldn’t wait for season two. As a science teacher, she liked that the character of Mr. Clarke had such a good relationship with the students. But she also loved the show for its vivid storytelling and emotional power.
As newly-minted superfans, Ms. Brown and Ms. Carrillo found endless fodder for discussion. They debated the importance of Barb (Ms. Brown was about as pro-Barb as one can be -- Ms. Carrillo, not so much). They both binged season two, and talked about the mysteries, the cliffhangers, and what would happen next.
Between excited debates about the story and characters on the show, Ms. Brown and Ms. Carrillo had an epiphany: they decided that the spring 2019 classroom transformation should be Stranger Things. They knew they had to get assistant principal McLane and principal Bueno on board, so they launched a campaign to convince them to watch the show. As they suspected, McLane and Bueno were hooked. Peer pressure: it ain’t just for students. The plan worked: the Stranger Things transformation for San Jacinto’s graduating fifth grade class of 2019 was all systems go.
CARA: This was going to be the biggest classroom transformation they’d ever attempted. But to be truly effective – to create that excitement they learned about at Ron Clark Academy – they had to do it in secret.
In December of 2018, the plotting began. The Upside Down wasn’t built in a day. Nor was Joyce’s living room, or Castle Byers, or the arcade, or the sinister Hawkins National Laboratory. The staff members began furtively ordering props and sourcing them from their own homes. The living room would need all kinds of lights, especially Christmas lights, and a couch, and they’d have to find the wood scraps for Castle Byers, and of course they’d need Eggo waffles – lots of Eggo waffles.
Plus, Ms. Brown was determined that her students would dig through Demogorgon guts to find particular treasures. And it turns out you can’t just order Demogorgon guts on the Internet. Ms. Brown concocted gooey slime out of shaving cream, glue, contact solution, and black dye. Within the slime, she hid things like metal paper clips, wood blocks, and pieces of plastic. After the students discovered the objects, they could practice measuring mass and weight.
By the spring of 2019, the staff had assembled everything they needed. They stayed after school and worked late into the night to transform a few classrooms into sets from the show. And when the fateful morning finally rolled around, they were ready for the big reveal.
On an ordinary day, the students meet for a morning assembly and then go to their classrooms to have breakfast.
But on this very extraordinary day, the fifth graders walked into school and noticed a few signs on the walls advertising a search for a missing kid named Will Byers. When the students got to morning assembly, they settled down as usual, ready for their regular daily routine. And then, in walked Ms. Carrillo, their math teacher, dressed as Joyce Byers from Stranger Things, yelling, “Where’s Will? Where’s Will?”
CARA: The children who had never seen the show were a little confused. Some of the kids thought Ms. Carrillo had lost it. But the ones who loved the show, and who knew their teachers loved the show – were first astonished, and then super-excited. Ms. Brown, their science teacher, walked in wearing a lab coat and goggles. Ms. McLane came in dressed as Hopper. And the real hit of the day was when their very professional, very composed principal, Ms. Bueno, entered the room dressed as Eleven.
Now that the kids knew that a classroom transformation was afoot, the teachers explained their mission for the day. Using skills they’d been practicing all year in reading, science and mathematics, they were going to solve puzzles and find clues that would help lead them to find Will Byers. The teachers took pains to ensure that students who hadn’t seen the show would still enjoy and understand the day’s games - which, of course, were really just 5th grade lessons disguised in scary, spooky ‘80s throwback costumes.
The students went off in prearranged groups to seek clues and use critical thinking to find the location of an escaped Demogorgon (yup, it included digging through that homemade slime in the science classroom), crawl through a tunnel made of desks into the Upside Down, solve math problems right in the Byers house, and generally have a blast in the world of a show that uses horror, science fiction, and fantasy to keep audiences spellbound. They even got to have fun in the “arcade,” solving reading and language arts problems on computers.
Ms. Carillo, Ms. Bueno, Ms. McLane and Ms. Brown may not have had the same budget as the TV show, but they had the kind of tenacity and refusal to give up that Joyce Byers herself might’ve recognized and appreciated very much indeed. Which is good, because Ms. Carillo taught a series of 90 minute math lessons right in Joyce’s living room.
CARA: The kids loved it. And the teachers did too – Ms. Carillo watched with delight as the students threw themselves into the day’s adventures, without even realizing they were actually working on skills their teachers had been trying to help them understand all year. Yet all of a sudden, the facts, vocabulary, and equations were like second nature to them. They couldn’t stop talking about it when the day was over.
And the next week, when that big springtime test rolled around, the teachers noticed that the students had much less anxiety than before. The fifth grade as a whole seemed to have more confidence and less fear.
So did it work? Did the big, elaborate, sprawling, goofy, thoughtful and very fun Stranger Things transformation actually transform the school for the better?
Absolutely.
The fifth grade class of 2019 did incredibly well on their standardized test, scoring better than the fifth grade classes in years before them. And San Jacinto Elementary, the school that had been failing five years prior, got its highest rating in years – a B. Only a few other schools in the district did as well or better. Thanks to these incredible gains, the school received awards of distinction in math and science from the state of Texas. It was a true underdog success story.
When the test results came in, Ms. Carillo pulled students into the hallway individually to tell them how they did. In previous years, the students who passed were often so shocked that they burst into happy tears and gave her a hug. But this year, she saw a big difference. The kids who found out they passed were confident, almost laid-back about it. They said they’d known going into the test that they were going to do great.
MS. CARILLO: I mean this year I was very...I was shocked ‘cause when I told them ‘guess what’, they were like: I passed. And I was like, how do you know? And they were like, because I know I passed. Like they were so confident and they were so sure of themselves ‘cause they were like I know I went in and I was confident in what I did.
CARA: Plus those who hadn’t been Stranger Things fans before the show were almost all in love with it now.
When the class of 2019 graduated fifth grade and went off to middle school, they left behind a very different San Jacinto Elementary from the one they entered in kindergarten. Along with their teachers, they’d helped transform the school.
And they left the staff a pretty big task: how can they ever top a transformation that big and cool? It’s one mystery these superhero educators are more than equipped to solve, over and over and over again. After all, great teachers don’t do anything halfway.
CARA: When I first read this essay I didn’t know what to expect, and I was really blown away by it. I was really moved by the dedication that the teachers had, all the teachers at an entire school. They had this mindset to lift up the students. It’s so hard to be a teacher anyway and they spent extra time, you know, after school was over traveling to another school to learn about this classroom transformation and then to recreate the Stranger Things set. That’s an amazing, very difficult undertaking. I’m sure it was fun but still, the idea of making the demogorgon with the slime, and having the kids walk into a whole other world is just, I really got the chills when I read this. And I was really truly moved.
CARA: You know, one teacher in your life can change the whole trajectory of your life. I know I’ve had a teacher in 4th grade who changed my life and a teacher in high school. My high school math teacher who I am still very good friends with, Ms. Lechner Kline because then she got married, one day ran into me and she asked me where I was applying to college. And I said, well I’m applying to these schools because I know I’ll get scholarships because we didn’t have any money. And I remember her shaking her head going, oh no. No no. Come sit with me. And she made me apply to different schools. I said, I’ll never get in, they don’t take people like me. I don’t have enough money. But she made me apply to these great schools and I got into Columbia. And she said, you must go there. And it, going to Columbia changed my life in terms of learning and seeing the world, and had she not taken that interest in me, I would never have been on the trajectory that I am in my life now, even though I was already acting then. But teachers are these unsung heros. We all have stories about them. But what these teachers did, you know they’ve got to act. That’s very hard. They’ve got to teach and act and those kids will remember this for the rest of their lives. And they may go on to become teachers and this will be their story and they’ll share it and I feel like it will have a domino effect.
CARA: If I could talk to these teachers, I would say... I would just give them the biggest hug and just… I’m a privately like religious person but like spiritual, I would just say really God Bless You. Because it’s really like this work, work on this deeper level of making a difference in these kids’ world, I’m so… I wish there was a video of this. I would love to see it. I just think that it’s just they really truly are heroes. You are heroes, cause just to go to a classroom every day and be there for the kids is hard, but to go above and beyond outside of your regular hours with your own lives and with your own families and I’m sure whatever struggles you have in your own personal lives… Is just, it’s so inspiring. I wish there was even a better word than inspiring.
MS. CARILLO: I mean these kids definitely leave like footprints on our hearts, like they, we get super attached to them. I mean, I do, whether you want to or not it happens. You’re with them so many hours out of the day so I mean it’s a challenge but it’s rewarding in the same sense.
MEREDITH: Thank you for listening to Because I Watched. We’re going to take a break for the holidays, but don’t worry. We’ll be back in January when we’ll hear how Orange is the New Black paved the road for one woman’s journey of self acceptance. If you like what you heard, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts! It makes it easier for other people to find the show. Because I Watched is produced by Netflix and Spoke Media. Today’s essay was written by Sara Benincasa and performed by Cara Bono. Special thanks to the teachers at San Jacinto Elementary for sharing their story. Thanks for listening