Welcome to episode three of the newest series of Changed for the Better: Ask Tirro! This time, Nausheen Rokerya puts me in the hot seat!
We’re on a roll with Ask Tirro! We started out with Nathalie Alcime and Hernz Laguerre, Jr. asking me all sorts of questions about my career, my path from the beginning, my artistic process, and how my first act has influenced my second act. It’s actually a lot of fun to turn things around and really think about all these things. When you have a full-time career that you love and are raising a family full-time, you don’t often get much of a chance to wax philosophical. You just put on your big-girl pants and do your best to make things up as you go.
My episode 46 guest, Nausheen Rokerya, is no different. She is a full-time attorney for VNS Health and raising a beautiful family of her own. She understands the challenges and the glory of wearing all the hats and it was exciting to sit with her again, fielding some of her questions. Here’s a glimpse of some of our conversation. Watch the full episode on the YouTube channel (link at the top of the blog).
How has the diversity at Spring Valley High School impacted you personally? The short answer: In amazing ways. It really hit home as I was sitting in the director’s seat, tasked with the responsibility of casting students. To give deference to kids for roles who I, as a white woman with a white upbringing, might not have originally thought of, but that was my casting pool. The beauty of my working there and exposure for all of these years has really, in a practical sense, changed how I apply the rules of casting. I have to get down to not what they look like, but who they are and the character-based features that they present.
Is age truly just a number? Is it something more? Reflect on this concept of age. With age, there are pros and cons. You experience physical body changes, mental/cognitive changes that are sometimes frustrating and difficult. But, the life experience makes you smarter, so I work smarter, not harder. There’s a great benefit to age. We, the aging, instead of lamenting our age, we need to make ourselves physically stronger to make sure that we keep up with and balance out the natural decline that aging has. (Emotionally and mentally, we are pretty strong.)
I think I’m a better teacher now because I had to figure so many things out when I was younger and more energetic, but I spent a lot of my energy figuring things out. Now, there’s more down time that I can enjoy because I don’t have to over-plan or over-anxiety things.
As a child/young adult, what did you think you were going to be doing? What were you worried about and how does that compare to the reality of where/who you are now? Is it wrong to say that I don’t remember a lot of my childhood? It wasn’t until high school that I pressed the accelerator all the way down to the floor. [In high school] I wanted to be on Broadway. What changed was when I got into “the business” and I saw what it really was about, and it wasn’t what I fell in love with in the school setting. The shift for me was really kind of easy to leave the “I want to be a performer” over there.
Performing can be any time in your life. You’ll be a different you but that’s okay.
What is one thing you wish your students would or would not do? I wish they would trust themselves more. I wish they would not doubt themselves.
Ugliest teaching moment. It’s not a particular moment. It’s more of an ugly feeling. The occasional assumption [of] “What do you mean you don’t have a pencil?” The ugliness for me is the moment I forget where these kids are coming from. We don’t know every aspect of their story, and we should never, ever assume that they have or don’t have something.
Least favorite part of your job. 1. Faculty meetings. 2. It’s hard to be in a school that is so far behind in its resources.
We got into an extended discussion about the benefits of the arts to students and how that are not automatically built-in to a school’s curriculum. They are often considered add-ins, expendable budget lines that are the first on the chopping block when things get tight. Nausheen asked for my thoughts on the impact on student who don’t have regular access to the arts from an early age. I had a lot of thoughts; you’ll have to watch the interview to dive into them all, but this was the center of my answer: In order to establish higher levels of talent/ability, you have to start early. Arts awareness; programs like the ones that we have, need to survive to show the community and to show the young ones what kids are capable of doing with good programs.
We rounded out our conversation with this final question:
At some point you are going to retire. If you could choose one word to describe the legacy that you want to have left behind, what would that be? I had two words: possibility and love.
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