Monday, April 21, 2008

A Shakespearean Task

When I graduated from college, I intended to teach high school English. Then, my adviser suggested teaching middle school. I was only 22, looked very young, and felt uncomfortable with prospect of teaching students only four years younger than myself.

It turned out that teaching middle school was great. The kids are actually a lot of fun, and it's my personal theory that all secondary teachers should start in middle school: if you can make it there you can make it anywhere.

The one drawback was that I did not get to teach the really cool literature that is available to teach at the high school level. There were some fun books: The Giver, The Outsiders (EVERY kid loves that one.) But I didn't love the books.

A huge motivation for moving to high school was teaching a more interesting curriculum. I was very bummed to discover this summer that my school was one of those moving away from teaching novels, however. It's a current theory in high school English that the only way to teach our standards is to use a textbook (SO Wrong by the way...I've never know a student to fall in love with a textbook.) Instead of teaching cool novels to my 10th graders, I've been forced to use the textbook, which is so lame.

However, today I got to realize a dream of mine. I taught my students Shakespeare. Granted, it's not my favorite play--Julius Caesar, but it's still total fun. I love how Shakespeare can spark instant love within a student, even if he doesn't totally understand what's going on. So many kids were just transfixed by what we were reading today. It has brought so many kids out of their shells, made them really excited to talk about Literature.

Also, actually reading Shakespeare has taken apart some of their misconceptions about it. Several students raised their hands after we had read a bit: "Hey, I thought this was supposed to be proper English." We were able to talk about how language changes and how, since this was written about 400 years ago, imagine how much is different now.

Not all kids were enthralled today. There were some mighty big sighs at the end of Cassius's longest speeches. But it was a good day. It took me seven years to finally teach Shakespeare and I'm so glad I got this opportunity.

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