Wingate teacher going to Japan

Jerry Cronin

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

FORT WINGATE — Fort Wingate High School’s puppet master is going to Japan.

Jerry Cronin, who teaches English at the high school, has been accepted as a participant in this year’s educational program financed by the Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund, which was launched in 1996 to express appreciation on behalf of the approximately 6,800 Japanese who have participated in the Fulbright Program since 1952.

As part of the program, Cronin will join hundreds of other teachers from throughout the United States for a visit to Japan from June 8-26, during which the participants will attend workshops and seminars led by experts on Japanese education, culture, government and economy.

For Cronin, what this means is a chance to learn more about one of his favorite subjects — puppets.

Cronin has become a fan of puppetry and has been using it in his classes at Fort Wingate in an effort to make learning English — and especially Shakespeare — a little more fun.

“We have been doing puppet plays, doing scenes from plays like Hamlet and Macbeth from Shakespeare and even ‘Death of a Salesman,’” he said.

Going the puppet route has not only helped make the plays come alive for the students, but it also helps the shyer students get used to speaking in public.

The Independent did an article about Cronin last April in which he talked about using a National Endowment of the Arts award to get better acquainted with Shakespeare’s plays and making them more relevant to his students, most of whom have little, if any, knowledge of the plays before taking his classes.

The article also talked of Cronin’s fight to conquer stage-four colon cancer, something that is almost always fatal.
“Only 8 percent of those who get it actually beat it,” he said last year. Today, he said he is still cancer free and not taking any treatment other than yearly check-ups.

This has only made him more aware, he said, of how lucky he is to have this extra time to teach and enjoy life.
And enjoying English is something that is made easier by using techniques such as having the students do their own versions of the plays using puppets, he said.

“They really enjoy the puppets,” he said, “and they add their own comedy and flavor to the plays.”

He is hoping when he goes to Japan that he gets a chance to learn more about the Japanese people’s love of puppets and how it has become so ingrained in their culture and in their school system.

And when he does, he plans to use what he has learned to make his classes even more relevant and fun.