Ok so I preform magic at school useually after we are done with out lessons I will play around with something and I wait until I'm asked to do something today I prefourmd pressure and crazy mans handcuffs but there's one guy in my class who is a know it all and continues to try to expose every little thing I do. He dose this at the point when I have grasped every ones attention in the class and as if on cue he blurts out " oh your just lifting two cards, oh your just putting it in that hand, oh it's in your pocket. We have all felt with people like this
So what do I do to shut him up and still have my audience on my side?
A lot of very wise and experienced people recommend not performing at school. On the other hand, a lot of very wise and experience people say, "do as many shows as you possibly can" (a Lance Burton phrase originally, I believe).
I think of it like this.
When you leave school, do you want to be a professional performer? If you do, then getting experience playing to hard audiences now is going to stand you in very good stead. Perform to everyone. Teachers, students you know, students you don't know, try and arrange formal stage or parlour shows in your school...do literally everything you can to perform. A school is actually a relatively safe environment while acting as a microcosm of scenarios and experiences you'll come across in your adult life. The lessons you learn from performing at school are going to be as important to you as anything else you might learn at school, so keep performing, think of every performance as a show, and keep trying to find ways to make your shows better.
If, on the other hand, you don't want to be a professional performer, then the advantage you'll gain from performing magic every day may well be outweighed by the social cost of being pigeon-holed as "magic boy". You won't be able to interact with people on a normal human level. People will think of you as just a magician and not as a person so you won't necessarily have a lot of close relationships. When you leave school, all that anyone will remember about you is that you were the one who did magic. When you meet up with old school friends they'll ask "Hey, do you still do magic? I bet you've got your own show in Vegas by now!" and you're going to have to tell them you aren't doing it for a living and it will be awkward.
So, before you decide how you're going to deal with the jerks, decide whether you really want to be performing magic in school, and that totally depends on your ambitions in the art.
If you decide to carry on performing magic at school (which means you've decided you want to become a professional performer), then here are a couple of thoughts:
Jerks, hecklers and know-it-alls are good. They're what you want. If you didn't get any then you'd be missing some of the most valuable flight-time a school can offer. So, the next time someone heckles or tries to mess you up, smile to yourself, because that jerk is unwittingly making your route into professional magic easier. The more your perform to tough audiences, the more you'll learn to deal with it. Even if, in the moment, you freeze up, the trick goes wrong and everyone laughs, it doesn't matter...it's school. Go home, think about specifically what went wrong and work out what you'd do the next time it happens. Then go back to school and perform a similar trick in earshot of the guy who messed you up before.
We've all heard this thing about 10,000 hours practice making you an expert. Well, it's not quite as simple as that but this is true: The more you do something, the better your chances of becoming an expert at it. A pianist who plays a piece badly 1,000 times is more likely to become an expert that someone who plays that piece quite well once. Even if every show goes badly (which they won't), you'll be building up a huge arrary of subtle performance skills without really noticing it. You'll have learned to be aware of your angles, you'll have learned to hold a group's attention, you'll have learned to spot when someone's going to heckle, you'll have learned (the most important lesson) to relax in front of an audience...as well as having learned some decent tricks. Then you'll go out and perform in the real world and...guess what? People are more polite and less jerky in the real world! So suddenly everything will seem easier, more fluid, and you'll notice what a slick performer you've become.
I'll reiterate it one more time, because I think it's important. School is for learning and setting you up for later life. If you want to be a professional performer, then school is the best place to perform, and the fact that it's hard is one of the best things about it.
