Jake Barron

I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas and graduated from Paschal High School. I am now a teacher of literature at Arlington Heights High School. I grew up observing Imagination Celebration, initially, because my mother worked for FWISD.

Then I remember some of my early experiences around the age of 7 or 8. I went to a program where I made elaborate masks and stained glass pictures.

In my middle and high school years, I was particularly fond of going to the annual Shakespeare theatre to see the dramas and tragedies. Imagination Celebration presented “Shakespeare in the Park”, especially for students.We went to the park and with many hundreds of students who got to attend. Sometimes IC also sent Shakespeare to schools.

The greatest gift that Imagination Celebration gave to me was a love for Shakespeare very early in my life. Those early cultural experiences with IC helped expose me. They gave me the opportunity to take an early liking to Shakespeare.

Something I like to think that I picked up on very quickly back then is that the stories may have happened in remote places hundreds of years ago, but the ideas that they convey are universal and always will be.

My early love for Shakespeare helped me to decide to become a literature teacher. Now, I love to teach Shakespeare in my classes. I also use my love for “Star Wars” to help make the “Odyssey” and similar high school material seem less remote to my students.

“StarWars” goes along well with curriculum and has many similar elements with the Odyssey as well as with Shakespeare. In this way I hope that I am essentially doing for my students what Imagination Celebration did for me - helping to bring the material to life and translate the material to its relevance today. I hope to help awaken my students to understanding of the amazing enduring and universal nature of the “Odyssey” and other classics, written so very long ago, but as relevant to today as they have always been and will ever be.

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