Since 2016, the students have been collectively translating Don Quixote into English. With the help of dozens of dictionaries and the approval of acclaimed Don Quixote translator Edith Grossman, they are adapting the 400-year-old Spanish tale—a story about a traveling dreamer who never gives up—into a bilingual musical based also on their own lives. Six-year old Sarah tells of her mother’s journey across the desert from Mexico riding on the back of a tiger. Alex, a very private teenager, sings her coming out song to standing ovations. As the kids perform their work, they deliver a message of diversity, love, hope, and resilience essential to us all.
“People in the audience have told me that the performances lifted up their hearts, made them laugh, and moved them to compassion,” explained Haff. “The kids have said that after performing far and wide in college classrooms and government offices they now feel they belong, in the worlds of higher education and civic power; they belong in this country.”
Drawing from his experiences inside and outside the classroom, Stephen Haff developed a new teaching method using AA meetings, Quaker prayers and psychotherapy to create a more empathetic and collaborative way to learn. In this welcoming environment, all agreed that there would only be one rule: “Everyone listens to everyone,” a rule that has unlocked spectacular potential. Kids as young as five and as old as 17 arrive at Still Waters in a Storm, an after-school program in a small room in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where they practice reading and writing in English, Spanish, and Latin. For the students, many living in constant fear of deportation, Still Waters is a refuge. For Haff, it is the sanctuary he built following a breakdown caused by bipolar depression
Written with the same collaborative spirit that fills Still Waters, Kid Quixotes is both an inspirational memoir and expert examination of the power of translation, listening, and education, including in its pages a variety of voices and stories that often go unheard.
About the Author: Stephen Haff is the founder of Still Waters in a Storm, a one-room school serving Spanish-speaking immigrant children in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Previously, he taught English at a public school in Bushwick for nearly a decade. He earned his MFA in Theater Studies at Yale, and has made a living directing plays and writing essays for the Village Voice and other publications. Stephen lives in Queens with his wife, children’s book author Tina Schneider, and their three children.
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