Schooled

A number of things collided last month, and by the end of it I heard myself say it out loud: I want to bring the joy back. For those of us who have spent our lives in schools, that joy drives us, but lately it has been hard to hear the soundtrack of laughter and curiosity over the constant hum of risk and anxiety. So I can think of no better way to sing the praises of independent education than to sing it from the mountaintop, or at least from center stage at the Rosemary Heyl Theatre at Carlow University. That’s where the curtain goes up on Schooled: The Musical. Yes,  a musical written by a lifelong educator that shares the joy of impacting a life.  I walked with its creator, Peter Nilsson, to find out how a boarding-school English teacher ended up telling the most honest, hopeful story about school we’ve heard in years.

Liz: So when I grow up, I want to be you.

Peter: Come on.

Liz: I want to be writing and then producing a musical, writing and publishing a book, consulting and writing an amazing newsletter that gives everybody purpose and points them in the direction of what they should read. And I’m only touching on the things I know about you, but doing it with such an attitude of optimism that I wish we could clone you.

Peter: I don’t know if you want a lot of me’s running around. That’s very kind. Just trying to do the things we love, right?

If you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life. I mistakenly called my time leading a school as work. Now that I no longer spend my days surrounded by the joy of young people, I realize I never knew what work as a grind was. I think that is true for all of us who work in schools. Yes, it can be thankless. Yes, it is undervalued. Yes, it is under-compensated. But we change lives and live in the arena of hope for the future everyday. Allow Peter to remind you of your impact.

Peter: Going to a place like Andover was just like a kid in a candy shop. There are so many cool things I could do and be a part of. And I loved that. And I remembered after going to college, music and English double major, I said I’ll work at Middlebury for a year doing music stuff and then I’ll do a teaching fellow year as an English teacher and I’ll see which one I like more. And one year turned into two, turned into three, turned into five at Deerfield. I was really fortunate to land a teaching fellowship there. And what I loved about the work was that at a boarding school was that if you’re in a residential community like that, the school is going to draw on every part of who you are. … as a musician, I was advising a cappella groups, I was writing compositions for student groups, classical compositions. I’m also playing in bands on weekends and having a great time, but I was loving the intellectual life of being a teacher. I was loving the community that I was in.

Liz: But I love that you say that because we often say that in such a negative mindset that when you’re at a boarding school, you’re just asked to do everything. And you flipped it to say it was positive because it tapped into all of your passions.

Peter: Yes, 100%. If you think of this as a job, you’re going to resent it, the way that it sort of creeps into all what you do. But if you think of it as a way of life, then you will find it extraordinarily fulfilling. 

Ah yes – the purpose. I didn’t mention that as one of the profound benefits of teaching. You know your work matters. To be a catalyst for another person to find a passion, to overcome a challenge, to reach higher than expected – most people have to manufacture that in their jobs. Teachers live it.

Peter: The things you mentioned— book, school, the musical, and Educator’s Notebook. So I was at Deerfield for 5 years. Music was getting bigger and bigger and bigger in my life, and I kind of had this moment— it was a gradually accumulating moment where I realized that if I never tried to make music my main thing, I’d always regret it. So 5 years at Deerfield, starting my career at a place where many people finish it. I was also single at a boarding school in western Massachusetts, which is a great formula for being single at a boarding school for the rest of my life.

Liz: Imagine single at a boarding school in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Peter: Yes, fair, understood. So I said, you know what I’ve gotta try the music thing. I’ve got to put myself in a different place and see where it takes me. So I uprooted myself, much to my parents’ chagrin… and moved to New York City to be a musician.

In New York, Peter was picking up experiences throughout the next few years that all lead him to where he and his musical about school are today. 

Peter: I wrote a one-act Hamilton-style musical celebrating and satirizing boarding school.

I wanted it to authentically call out the good things and the bad things.

People often bring pre-conceived notions to what a musical is. From the very beginning, this production has been about telling authentic stories of students, teachers, and school leaders — and their experiences in schools today. Peter tells me it is meant to highlight the personal and professional challenges of being in schools in a time of turmoil, while also being engaging and fun. He staged it as a love letter to Deerfield as he was preparing to leave for a second time.

Peter: So I wrote this musical and put it up in spring of 2019. Total surprise again to the community except for the 25 teachers who were a part of it. And recorded it and we put it up on YouTube afterwards. And what was surprising to me was how it actually changed the lives of people in ways that I didn’t expect. A guy from the class of 1965, over 50 years since he graduated, writes an email to his classmates, and he says, “You know, Deerfield sometimes sends these newsletters. I sometimes open them, sometimes I don’t. I opened this one. There’s a link to a musical and I watched it. I wanted you to see it.” 

I was in a coffee shop a few months later, and this woman comes up and says, “Did you do that musical?” I said, yeah. She said, “I felt comfortable sending my son to boarding school because I saw that.”

I said, what? She said, I just saw the love and the positivity and energy in that room, and I did not know that that’s what it would be like in a place like that. Oh my goodness. What I realized from that was when I was a musician in New York City, I had musicianship, but I didn’t have anything to say. 

And 15 years in boarding schools, I had a lot to say about boarding schools. And I said it in a way that sort of felt like that music class in high school… oh, this is who I am.

Your passion meets your purpose and the energy is magnetic and felt far and wide from a single performance. This was just the beginning.

Peter: I saw a post on LinkedIn asking “Does anybody know any innovative performances in education?” 

So I sent him the musical. This is late August, summer of ’23. He sends me an email back saying, “I love it, let’s chat.” We chat Wednesday, 2 minutes in, he says, “I love your show, can you put it up in New York City in 5 weeks?”

So, I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. First, my show’s about boarding school and you want something about schools generally for your conference, right? He’s like, yeah, yeah, we’ll be at the conference, we’ll be at the New York Times Center, it’ll be blah blah blah, we’ll have all these people there. Um, and I say, second of all, I don’t even know if I can do that. Like, at Deerfield, I can be the composer, director, stage manager, whatever. But this is New York City, right? So give me 2 days. So it’s a Wednesday, so we schedule a call for Friday. I just call everybody I know for 48 hours. And a friend of mine from college is a theater professor at Carnegie Mellon, which has a good musical theater program. Yeah. And it’s like, yeah, we’ll get you some Tisch kids, we’ll get some Carnegie Mellon kids. Like, I think we can probably do this, or you can probably do this. 

Seeds turn up throughout Peter’s story, and if you listen closely, you’ll find one planted in our conversation too. When Peter had just five weeks to put Schooled on a New York stage, one of the first calls he made was to a college friend teaching theater at Carnegie Mellon. When we talked this past February, it seemed like a passing detail. Neither of us knew it was a breadcrumb leading straight to Pittsburgh. On October 18, Schooled takes the stage with a cast from Carnegie Mellon’s celebrated musical theater program, and a conversation between two people who love schools was the moment that seed was planted.

Peter: I learned in New York City you need to first hire a general manager because they’re gonna have contracts, they’re gonna manage contracts, right? And rehearsal spaces and unions and whatever. They’re gonna find you a director through their networks and a casting director. And they’re gonna find you a cast. Takes me 2 weeks to find a general manager. It takes them a week to find a director and a casting director. Takes the casting director a week to find a cast. 

So I have 4 days of rehearsal.

Liz: But you’re not using Carnegie Mellon and Tisch Kids.

He can’t say the names of the performers because of the nature of the contracts, but it was leading performers from leading shows that would knock your socks off, I promise. In the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, we were one step away from the broadway legends.

Liz: Oh my gosh, off the chain amazing.

Peter: It was, it was incredible, and I was in seventh heaven, and I felt so out of my league and so spiritually drunk.

It was absolutely incredible. And the response from the educators in the room was, we’ve never seen school presented like this, where it is authentic to the experience. Like, there’s real kid challenges, right? But it’s joyful, right? It’s good pedagogy even in the classes that are in it. I just felt like we need more narratives like that, that are lifting educators, that are lifting education, especially in a time when schools are, like, quite literally in the crosshairs of culture, right? Um, coming out of the culture wars, coming out of everything that’s been happening recently. And so I said, I need to spend more time on this.

In Schooled, teachers and leaders will see themselves and their students in ways that both bring joy and surface questions about what we do every day. Indeed it deserved more of Peter’s time. There was more story to tell.

Peter: I realized I want to make this into a full-length show to really tell the story of what it’s like to be in schools today in a positive way, not some like Dangerous Minds kind of thing again, or even Abbott Elementary, right? If you watch Abbott Elementary, it’s like Gosh, schools are terrible. Yeah, people in schools are terrible. Schools themselves are terrible. Let’s make it comic and maybe have some empathy for it. But there’s so much joy, there’s so much youth, there’s so much investment, there’s so much care from adults, and there are problems. And the key is not to shy away from those, but the key is also not to paint it as one large failed system, which is the narrative that is told over and over again. 

So I’ve started after New York in ’23, reconceiving the whole story into a full two-act, full-length, 2-hour narrative for a show.

And October 18th will be its premiere.

Peter: I think it kind of comes back to the same mission and goal from when I was a musician in New York City. Like, I want to leave the world better than I found it. I want it to have its best positive impact, whether that means it goes onto Broadway. Yeah. Or whether that means it is licensed to schools and colleges around the country. Wow. Yeah. Or whether that means it becomes part of regional theater houses. I don’t know. 

So I think coming back from that experience was a lesson in like, wait a minute, what’s good for me? Sounds very selfish now when I say it.

Liz: But it’s interesting because even as you said it was selfish. Your being selfish is giving the world Schooled and Irreplaceable and these two things really expand your classroom. And it was only possible because if you want to use your words, you got selfish.

It’s just all those little seed moments that you walk right by and you don’t realize what was planted.

Peter: Yeah, the things we’re pursuing now are like things that were planted decades ago. 

Near the end of our conversation, Peter and I kept returning to the idea of seeds: Andover’s required music class, the college friend teaching theater at Carnegie Mellon, the late-night pianos scattered across a boarding school campus. None of those moments looked like much at the time. That’s the thing about schools. We plant seeds every day and rarely get to see what grows. 

Sometimes, though, we do. A conversation in February becomes a curtain rising in October. So when I said I wanted to bring the joy back, maybe what I really meant was that I wanted to remember where it had been all along: in the work itself, in the kids, in the adults who show up for them. Schooled just happens to set it to music. 

Peter: Look what street we’re on.

Liz: Well, there you go. I mean, There you go. 

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