Jack Fry is a young actor who started teaching to support himself, only to find his true calling in that profession. It took a baptism of fire in a 5th-grade classroom in south-central Los Angeles for him to undergo such a metamorphosis. In his riveting and deeply moving monologue, They Call Me Mister Fry, Fry relives his first-year experiences in a No Child Left Behind school, a place where problem kids have their last chance at an education.
The child of a middle-class, midwestern family himself, Fry was completely unprepared for the immense challenge he faced in an inner-city classroom packed with kids from not just broken homes but broken lives. Many of them were "rape babies" or children whose parents were either in jail or had been gunned down on the streets.
Fry did everything he could to adjust to these new realities and to somehow begin to educate these supposedly “uneducationable” kids. Using the skills he had developed as an actor and a semi-professional magician, he put on something of a show in the classroom and began to turn them on to math, history and literature, only to be reprimanded for his maverick ways by a classroom monitor from the Board of Education.
Fry wickedly satirizes that uptight, bureaucratic woman in the course of his monologue -- along with sundry other characters, including his snooty ex-girlfriend -- but the monitor seemingly got the last laugh. Fry was suspended and was on the verge of losing his teaching license, until a union rep (and his principal) went to bat for him.
Fry was allowed to return to work and to the kids he had begun to not only understand but love. That change becomes the theme of Fry's monologue. It's not enough to reach a kid's mind, but his heart, he comes to realize. But for that to happen the teacher must also open his own heart to the kids themselves.
