Teaching in a Negro college whose student body is largely what is called disadvantaged, I find that my most successful projects involve drama, or dramatizing life and literature. Some two thousand years ago, in the Poetics, Aristotle wrote that action on a stage provides the spectator with an opportunity to purge his own strong emotions harmlessly through identifi cation with the events and people on that stage. Drama may be the only art form which fully recognizes man's gregarious nature. Sometimes students are considered dull because they are unresponsive to the usual academic approach and need to be awakened imaginatively. I discovered that one of my most successful teaching experi ences was a classroom for Freshmen who listened to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, re corded by the original Broadway cast. Students followed the play in their anthologies. At the end of the record, there was not a dry eye in the room. One boy broke the passionate silence with, Loman is my father Immediately students burst into talk, all simultaneously. Willy was their uncle, their brothers, their neighbors, they themselves. They knew him intimately. students derived such an emotional impact from the play that I ordered a film of Death of a Salesman, for classroom viewing. Following the film, the discussion sur prisingly developed that most of the students liked the recording better. Why? Their reasons?vari ous and thoughtful?suggested that the records allowed the listener free play of imagination, a chance to picture characters in their minds. One girl said she had conceived of the family as Ne groes. movie dispelled this preferred idea. She concluded: All families have the same problems. I quoted the opening of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to her: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. She expressed interest in the book, and later we had a remarkable conversation about Tolstoy. That was the first novel she had ever finished reading ! Perhaps more important than reading plays and listening to them on records is the students' actual participation in classroom presentations. There are many ways of involving students, from role playing to acting in a classroom production. Each semester I increase my library of mimeo graphed scripts of one act plays. Often we have readings of an adaptation of Chekhov's The Proposal, a farce about a neighbor coming to ask the hand of a landowner's daughter. In his shy ness and awkwardness, the neighbor gets into quarrels about acreage and dogs . . . whose dog is better, the neighbor's or the young woman's? Both the actors and the class audience relish this drama and find ready identification with the characters.