Marc Glassberg traveled all around, acting in plays, movies and TV shows. It has always been his passion to be in the drama industry. The entertainment business isn’t easy to be accepted into, but he worked hard to fulfill his dreams.

Students now know him as “Mr. Glassberg,” a drama teacher who began his career over 20 years ago. He says he enjoys it as much as he enjoyed being on stage. He explains that he has a specific way of helping students with their acting skills.

“Explore,” he said. “If you keep doing the same thing you’ve been doing, you’ll only be familiar with that one thing. However, if you explore your options and try a bunch of different things, you’ll get to experiment with what you are and aren’t good at.”

Being in the drama industry wasn’t just something he woke up and thought to do on a random day.

“This is really something I’ve always wanted to do since I was in high school. The majority of my friends were theater kids,” he said. He has taught students in New York and Los Angeles in the past, and now he’s here at Stagg, enlightening students to do their best.

He also teaches regular English classes. Junior Luci Gomez takes both of his classes and says that Glassberg is “a good teacher who really does care about what the students want. He’s also really lenient but he does have his rules.” She also explains that she loves the drama class because she gets to learn more about acting skills and how to improve her own.

He loves helping students reach their full potential, so he does whatever he can to do so. His noisy classroom can be a distraction while talking to other people, making him have to stop in the middle of sentences to tell kids to quiet down and focus on their work. When asked how the students at Stagg differ from those in New York and Los Angeles, he only replies, “There is no difference. Kids will be kids.”

Although there are many students drawn to the entertainment industry, they don’t want to be an actor or actress. English teacher Alice Henderson has drifted into another style of teaching, starting a brand new class called Literature Through Film, where students have four different units, all involving watching a collection of movies specified to certain genres.

“Many books, good and bad, are made into films, and what we do is discuss a variety of things, like if the actors are believable, if the movie follows the book, and if not, what changes were made,” Henderson explains.

Although they watch movies and discuss them, it’s still an English class. “We do watch movies in here,” Henderson said, “a lot, actually, but I try to mostly look on the English side of things.” The class takes notes and focuses on English, assessing what takes place throughout the story. Junior Pharoah Sabio says the class “really makes you think about the little things in the movie, like how they would have set up the scene before they started shooting and how the director came up with it and all that stuff.”

While talking, Henderson walks to a table in front of her classroom. Underneath is a box containing a collection of movies and novels like “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” “Forrest Gump,” “Sahara,” and others that she has collected and purchased over the years. “I’ve searched for and bought all these myself, as the district won’t fund it.”

“Believability and sound are one of the most important things regarding a movie,” she says. “If you turn off the sound and just watch, see if your reactions and emotions stay the same. If so, a good film was made.”