You are learning commanding a room with language: you will read the scene it happens in, learn 10 words and phrases, take apart the pattern behind them (rhetorical devices: anaphora, tricolon & antithesis), hear them in a conversation, rehearse them, and finish by saying one thing out loud to be graded.
92nd Street Y, Lexington Avenue, Upper East Side, then dinner at Café Boulud
The 92nd Street Y has hosted every voice that matters — poets, presidents, novelists, scientists. The stage is small, the audience is close, and the acoustics forgive nothing. I sat in the fourth row on a Tuesday evening to hear a keynote on the future of urban education. The speaker was a former superintendent from the Bronx. She had no teleprompter.
She opened with anaphora: 'I taught in a classroom with no heat. I taught in a classroom with no books. I taught in a classroom with thirty-eight children and one pencil sharpener.' The repetition built like a drumbeat. Each sentence was a tricolon of deprivation — heat, books, pencil sharpener — ascending from systemic to absurd.
Then the antithesis: 'We do not invest in education because children are the future. We invest because they are the present.' The cadence shifted. She modulated her voice — quieter now, forcing the audience to lean in. The room was silent.
Her peroration was extemporaneous. She stepped away from the podium. 'I didn't come here to convince you,' she said. 'I came here to remind you of what you already know.' The tricolon landed: 'That every child deserves a teacher. That every teacher deserves a school. That every school deserves a city that gives a damn.' The audience was on their feet. At Café Boulud afterward, no one could talk about anything else.