If practicing in a subject area is the best preparation for teaching it, then Jerome Babst, who replaced Ted Zayka as the drama teacher at the Bromfield School after Zayka unexpectedly resigned in the middle of the year, has much to offer.
At Bromfield, Babst teaches tenth-grade honors English, but in an earlier career, he worked as a technical writer. In 2009, he left a high-paying job at Microsoft in Cambridge to become a substitute teacher, hoping to transition into teaching high school full time.
At Bromfield, he teaches four drama courses: acting, advanced acting, technical theater, and advanced technical theater. Before he arrived at Bromfield, he worked at various theater companies and produced plays for the Natick Theater Ensemble, a group he founded in 1996.
Babst found neither technical writing nor managing a theater company fulfilling, he said.
“After a while all [technical writing] had to offer was a paycheck,” he said. Managing a theater company, “doesn’t give you time to do the things that made you start the organization in the first place,” Babst said.
Although Babst has experience acting and directing, it was his background in technical theater, he said, that made him a good fit for the Bromfield job, because Bromfield is unusual in employing a fulltime drama teacher and offering technical theater courses.
In his technical theater class, Babst teaches students how to use power tools and the fundamentals of building scenery. Advanced technical theater students design and build sets.
In beginning acting, he gets the students comfortable with being in front of a group. “Acting class has to be fun,” Babst said. He starts with an assignment “playing the self,” in which students write a monologue about themselves and perform it. Before they can play other people, students need to be able to play themselves, Babst said.
