Stalking the front of Room 126 in Suitland High School, special-education teacher Henri E. Hill spits out the words as if she can no longer tolerate their flavor.
"I.E.P.! Joke!" she fumes. "I.E.P. Individual Education Plan is a joke! Is there hope? When will we get the joke?"
The other teachers in the classroom during a recent staff development day understood her frustration and screamed with pleasure. Hill and her Suitland colleagues were learning to slam, a style of poetry based on intense, emotional experience and performance. For them, the creative process is part of a larger school system goal to relieve teachers' stress.
Their instructors were two "slamticians" who run a Prince George's business that offers stress management seminars to people in boardrooms and in prisons and other institutions.
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For Hill and her co-workers, implementing IEP education plans, which are individually tailored to students with special needs, is a tough job. They said they do not have enough support or resources, and that just adds stress to their jobs.
The staff also cites other concerns. Guidance counselors Ernest McDuffy and Rachel Mitchell each have a caseload of about 400 students. Algebra teacher Rena Pittman said she thinks her students are concerned more with sex, drugs and PlayStation than with school.
Math teacher Donna Humbles and her husband, Kelvin, are stressed because they were denied a chance to adopt a 3-year-old boy when an Environmental Protection Agency inspector found lead in the window jambs of their 92-year-old home.
"The number one way [to reduce stress], top of the list, is to talk," said workshop moderator Ty Gray-El, 50, a former executive for AMF bowling lanes who co-founded Slam Your Stress with Joaquin H. Williams, 33, in February 2000. "When you talk, you get it out."
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Last year, Gray-El and Williams toured local high schools, including Suitland, and instructors were so impressed they asked the duo to return to counsel teachers. The basics of Slam Your Stress revolve around understanding how each person and those around them process and react to stress.
It is a highly stylized production. In his sharp, pinstriped blue suit and with braids curling around his head, Williams is the self-proclaimed player from Toledo amping up the room with humor, hubris and histrionics. Gray-El is the spiritual adviser. He wears a gold No. 7 pendant because he considers it a sacred number and quotes data about stress-related problems such as drug abuse, suicide and heart disease to emphasize the need to reduce anxiety.
Gray-El met Williams in 1999 when he hired him as director of programs for AMF. Gray-El, a poet for 40 years, told Williams about his poetry and his interest in starting a business. Williams, who has been writing poetry since he was 5, formed the hip-hop group Defiant Giants while studying at Howard University. He was also looking to start his own business.
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Slam Your Stress was Williams's idea; it came to him while he was driving home from a poetry workshop. Gray-El had experience with motivational speaking -- he once walked on hot coals with self-empowerment pitchman Tony Robbins -- and the idea fit his three qualifications for a business: that it helped people, was something he loved and could be lucrative.
They conducted their first workshop in March 2000 and now hold about 15 seminars per month. Workshops can be as short as a lunch hour or as long as a three-day retreat. The company also plans to open a "slam academy" on Branch Avenue in the next few months.
The culmination of every workshop is a poetry slam. Gray-El and Williams give participants five to seven minutes to write. Their only advice is "come strong" and "be on time." The immediacy of the writing can create dramatic results, they said.
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"I appreciate you. I couldn't do it without you," said math teacher Kevin Johnson, performing his slam about the half-hearted platitudes he often hears as a teacher. "I'm tired of empty terms of appreciation, because some people want to [complain] because I want compensation?
"Don't appreciate me," he finished. "Pay me!"
Humbles wants to bring the program to her students.
"By sharing like that, everybody knows what your problems are," she said. It teaches them to support. A lot of our children don't know support. It's just a way to get to some bigger issues."
-- John O'Connor
Suitland High School teacher Monica Jackson hugs Ty Gray-El after Jackson read her poem at the Slam Your Stress workshop at the school Thursday.
