2006 September | Ms. Scarbary's class

“If you say that something smells to heaven, or that you see something in your mind’s eye, or that something is a foregone conclusion, or that the course of true love never did run smooth, then you are speaking Shakespeare.” – Rex Gibson, Teaching Shakespeare

As a pre-service ELA teacher, I have had my fair share of Shakespeare study. To me, it is never boring, and never tedious. I love The Bard, forsooth. I even went to The Globe (recreation) in London in April, making a side trip by myself since my travel companions couldn’t have cared less. That being said, I admit my failing: is difficult for me to empathize with readers who find Shakespeare dense and unreadable. As much as I want to excite my students and generate a passion for Shakespeare within them, I struggle against the heart of me that wants to scream, “It’s beautiful! Just sit down and READ IT!”

Gibson’s book has made it easy to identify the common grounds between Shakespeare’s language and the modern adolescent reader. The irony, the puns, the perfect malapropisms- Gibson highlights all these aspects as lures to entice readers discovering Shakespeare. His words permeate today’s culture in ways we don’t fully acknowledge. By identifying and then stressing those key turns of phrase, we teachers can make Shakespeare accessible. We can use his language, without having to paraphrase and rewrite. We should offer our students examples of how Shakespeare’s works are loaded with familiar phrases. In doing so, we allow them to expand their vocabularies, and discover for themselves that Shakespeare is not as difficult as they may have thought.

Comments (3)

Critical Theory in the Secondary Classroom

Filed under: Uncategorized — msscarbary at 1:02 pm on Tuesday, September 5, 2006

“Rarely do high school teachers make their theoretical approaches explicit by naming them to their students.” – Deborah Appleman, Critical Encounters in High School English

As English teachers, we DO ask the questions of reader response theory: “What does the text mean to YOU?” “What do YOU think the writer is trying to say?” and we ask the questions that (hopefully) make our students think critically from a feminist standpoint: “How do the townspeople view Hester Prynne as opposed to Dimmesdale?” “Why are their standards different for women than men?” As educators, we want our kids to examine and utilize those multiple lenses. But we rarely, if ever, TELL them what we are doing, what they are doing. We don’t give our classrooms the vocabulary to go along with the practice. We don’t EXPLICITLY employ the language of Literary Theory. That is where we do disservice to their future learning. Inhabiting various critical perspectives can be and will be required of our students in other disciplines, and in many occupations, and we want our students to be able to articulate their comfort and familiarity with those skills. I accept Appleman’s challenge to incorporate “named” approaches for examining texts in my future classroom.

Comments (4)

Ms. Scarbary’s class

I write to find out what I’m talking about. – Edward Albee

Resources for Building Vocabulary and Concept Development

The Everyday Language of Shakespeare

Critical Theory in the Secondary Classroom

Pages

Archives

Categories

Meta