Reading Shakespeare

Source: www.roomone.training

Shakespeare, man of mystery. Enough is known through public record to know that the man existed. However, any personal detail is unknown, to the point that there isn't technically proof that Shakespeare wrote the plays we read today. I personally adhere to the camp that he did write them, that we owe his friends a debt of gratitude for putting his works together in the First Folio. Why complicate things? Besides, the bigger matter is the plays themselves. Works of art that literally created a sizable portion of our English language and have lasted hundreds of years because of their eloquence and humanity. Read any Shakespeare plot line, examine the themes, and you will see present day humanity playing out before your eyes. Homo sapiens haven't changed as much as we'd like to think over the centuries.

Why all the fuss about Shakespeare on the blog today? Well, I've read multiple Shakespeare works over the years, but in my past ten years as a teacher, Romeo and Juliet is the only one that has popped up in my curriculum. I know it well and it's easy to teach because, thanks to pop culture and the nature of teenagers, everyone already knows it for the most part. This year AP Literature brings me to teaching other works, like Hamlet and Othello, and new experiences in the teaching of Shakespeare.

Ah Hamlet, emo before emo was a thing. An emotional wreck, spilling his guts and emotional distress soliloquy after soliloquy, Hamlet at first reminds me of whiny Romeo. Of course, Hamlet has good reason (Romeo not so much). In short, his father, the king, has passed away; his uncle marries his mom a month later, denying Hamlet his dreams; a rival country is planning an attack on Denmark; his father's ghost is walking the castle watch tower with a secret; a dear one commits suicide; murder and general mayhem reveal themselves. It's a mess like only Shakespeare can create and put into motion through poetry. I'm enjoying it.

Of course, some of my students will tell you differently. Pulling apart Shakespeare can be intimidating. It's never been particularly intimidating for me, although I bought new copies of each play in No Fear Shakespeare editions, just in case. Haven't needed it yet though, so I started to wonder how it is Shakespeare clicks for me. I am a reader, which helps, but even I don't know the meaning of every little odd word and detail Shakespeare uses, so how is it I understand? It came to me in a teachable moment one day.

We'd reached Hamlet's first soliloquy (Act I, scene ii), read through and settled into a worksheet to pull it apart for meaning. Immediately they felt lost and didn't hesitate in saying so. At first I thought, what's there not to get, but proceeded to reread the beginning with them (lines 129-132 in my edition):

            "Oh that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
             Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
             Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
             His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, God!"

I realized as I read that I was only using one phrase and two other words of those four lines to translate in my head. So I told them to pick out the familiar words and string them together for meaning, ignoring all else. Conversation progressed something like this:

Me: What happens if your flesh melts? (Indiana Jones, Shakespeare beat you to it.)
Class: You die...you'd be dead.
Me: What does "Everlasting" mean and why is it capitalized? Only proper nouns are capitalized.
Class: It means forever...so it's a name?
Me: Who is the only being we claim to be a forever being?
Class: God
Me: What does slaughter mean?
Class: To violently kill.
Me: And adding "self"?
Class: ohhhh...suicide!

And using those couple of items, they pieced together for me that Hamlet wants to die and would commit suicide, except his God has made it a sin to do so. It was a learning moment for them, figuring out how to read some of this craziness and it was a learning moment for me to be able to show them, when I hadn't been sure how to do so before. It doesn't make it easy though...it still takes time to slow down and go through the lines, digging for previous knowledge and connecting those pieces together. But it's a starting point. They'll be reading Shakespeare next year and some of them in college even, so hopefully we've made a good start of it.

What about you readers? Any luck with Shakespeare?

The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

Source: Amazon.com

The Teacher Wars, by Dana Goldstein
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication date: September 2, 2014
Category: Nonfiction, Education
Source: I received this e-galley from the publisher, via Edelweiss, in exchange for my honest review.

I am a teacher, so reviewing The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession, by Dana Goldstein, was inevitable, self assigned, summer reading homework. I made so many highlights on my e-galley to help write a good summary and then read Amazon's perfect sum-up and thought, "Why reinvent the wheel?" The summary of The Teacher Wars, from Amazon:

"Teaching is a wildly contentious profession in America, one attacked and admired in equal measure. In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been similarly embattled for nearly two centuries. From the genteel founding of the common schools movement in the nineteenth century to the violent inner-city teacher strikes of the 1960s and '70s, from the dispatching of Northeastern women to frontier schoolhouses to the founding of Teach for America on the Princeton University campus in 1990, Goldstein shows that the same issues have continued to bedevil us: Who should teach? What should be taught? Who should be held accountable for how our children learn? 

She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change. And she also discovers an emerging effort that stands a real chance of transforming our schools for the better: drawing on the best practices of the three million public school teachers we already have in order to improve learning throughout our nation’s classrooms."

Okay, so it looks like I've cheated, using Amazon to make up most of my review, but before you give me detention, the hallmark of a good teacher is seeking out and using good materials wherever possible! This summary is good material.

To be quite honest, it took me a good amount of time to read The Teacher Wars and I read many other books alongside it. The Teacher Wars provides the details of the historical figures and accounts that moved education forward, which sometimes gets dry or just needs broken up to keep the reader's focus. If your interest doesn't lie in education, this is obviously not the book for you. Even if you have some interest, this still may not be the book for you. This book is for those who are really interested in educational policy, where it's been and where it's headed; specifically, how these two things are connected.

I found the last three chapters the most interesting because they deal with the past thirty years, which are the policies I have dealt with as I've earned my degrees and started my career. The epilogue was also useful, with a rundown of what would help education the most, based on the accumulated research, along with brief explanations.

As a young teacher with many years left in my career, the panicked talk of Common Core and new teacher evaluation systems stirs more feelings than many people realize, so it was crazy that this book connects today's issues facing education to those that have been around for almost the entire 175 years of American public education. It seems appropriate the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald would come to me here: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."