Frank Breslin, retired teacher of literature and languages, explains to students how to read and enjoy Shakespeare. This is the beginning of a series.
Here is the beginning of his advice:
“The best way to read a play by Shakespeare is to bypass the editor’s introduction and start reading the play itself. Don’t let the editor or anyone else tell you what the play is about, but find out for yourself. “Trust your own judgment and think for yourself!” Let this be your Declaration of Independence. Anything else is building on sand in a world that tells you what to think, or to follow the crowd by not thinking at all.
“It’s important to be your own person when young, because if you routinely rely on the judgment of others, you’ll undermine your belief in yourself and cease to be a person at all. Don’t be dependent on the opinions of others, some of whom will be only too happy to take over your life. When you believe in yourself, you become transformed as a person, take control of your life, and your grades will begin to take care of themselves.
“Some Themes of Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s plays take you out of the comfort zone of a 21st-century American world and set you down in different places and times, where different problems, values, and worldviews prevail. This exposure gives you a broader sense of life’s possibilities and of various ways of being human, in addition to the accustomed American way. It also provides you with a more cosmopolitan frame of reference within which to evaluate the world and the human drama that takes place within it.
“Facing one’s demons, the healing power of art, insight through suffering, the redemptive and destructive power of love, meaninglessness and alienation as ways to finding yourself, the danger of fame, the loneliness of power, ambition and collateral damage, compassion and becoming human, the fragility of human existence, and life without morals are a few of the themes that make up the complex yet fascinating world of Shakespeare as his characters struggle to become who they are despite the setbacks that stand in their way.”
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Sorry, but Shakespeare, quaint as he may be, doesn’t meet the information-based text requirements of Common Core, and he certainly doesn’t meet the needs of today’s employers.
Instead, please have your students closely read Federal Reserve Bank minutes, as per the suggestion of that renowned K-12 educator, David Coleman: that’ll put the rigor mortis in the rigor of your classroom!
Lovely.
Also a wonderful discussion on public broadcasting today of Alice in Wonderland, published 150 years ago, including the illustrations, the author” expertise in logic and mathematics, the era, some differences between reading this (or having it read to you) as a child, versus reading it later in life.
Mr. Breslin’s comments remind me of “Dead Poet’s Society” when Keating has his students rip the intro pages out of their poetry books –
[after hearing “The Introduction to Poetry”]
John Keating: Excrement! That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard! We’re not laying pipe! We’re talking about poetry. How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? “I like Byron, I give him a 42 but I can’t dance to it!”
And so too how can you describe a person by a test score? You can’t!
Exactly my thoughts, Michael. Do middle & high school teachers really read/teach Shakespeare, now that CCSS/PARCC have highjacked the curriculum?
And exactly why would worker drones of the future (i.e.,”Other people’s children”) need to read such things anyway…it would give them ideas!
Would Mr. Breslin advise students to read the ENTIRE play (or piece) by Shakespeare or just excerpts? In the 9th grade common core module, students read only excerpts of Romeo and Juliet. I believe 11th graders read only excerpts of Hamlet too. It might be interesting to hear from some New York English teachers!
Nice. This advice works well for Greek and Latin literature as well.
That’s what we did in my classroom. We started reading Act 1 of “Romeo and Juliet” without any explanation as to meaning/theme, and then at the end of each Act—and sometimes at the end of scenes—we had discussions that led to essays linking “Romeo and Juliet” to the world my students lived in.
dysfunctional families
wealth
poverty
suicide
gang warfare
love at first site and what that means
The school where I taught had a 70 – 80% poverty rate—if we use free and/or reduced breakfast and lunch to measure it. The community was also home to multi-generational street gangs at war with each other. When I say war, I mean war with bullets and bloodshed. The only thing missing was roadside bombs and RPGs.
The students I worked with related well with “Romeo and Juliet” and the discussions were always lively.
Romeo and Juliet was written in about 1599; it deals with teenage suicide. In the 1970s a list of 10 suicidal behaviors displayed by teens was inaugurated in public schools, especially via counseling departments. The list has been refined several times. The teen suicide symptom list was shared among teens to encourage them to seek adult help from qualified school personnel for themselves or their friends.
For the decades that I taught English/Language Arts I handed the list to my sophomore students and told them to find the suicidal symptoms in Romeo and Juliet. (Shakespeare had the characters display nine of the ten symptoms – in 1599.)
Every student at every ability level searched and re-searched the text willingly.
Yes, Shakespeare belongs in public schools, yet his plays are disappearing from required reading lists even in colleges. There is a CCSS dumbing down that has negative consequences – foreseen and unforeseen.
Thank you Frank Breslin for expressing how many of us feel AND SO WELL!
We educators know the value of reading – reading that gives us freedom to think. When we read quality literature, universal and timeless themes prevail. So students can put the themes in the context of their own lives. We know this… we have always known this! But common core stifles thinking. Students are being manipulated- being told “exactly how to read a passage” and “exactly how to understand something”… mind-numbing. Even the actual reading is adapted FOR COMMON CORE…. as if life were scripted!
I had a conversation with a very bright 6th grade boy after school a while back. He told me about the subjects he was interested in. I then asked him what he found not so interesting or more challenging. It was heart-wrenching to hear him tell me that he found reading challenging. I asked him why. He told me that he reads these paragraphs all the time and then has to answer questions about the paragraphs and sometimes he reads the entire paragraph and realizes he has been thinking of something else. He goes back and reads it again. Then has to pick apart the reading to answer the questions which he only sometimes has success with.
He took one such reading out of his backpack (his homework). It was a passage about two neighborhoods – one rich and one poor that burned down. It was all about finding differences and similarities and quite a boring read for a 6th grader. Who can blame a child for getting worn down. The teacher was clearly following the mandated protocols for common core! The paragraph had vocabulary bolded. Whatever happened to allowing a child to read a book of interest and find their own vocabulary words they want to know! Gosh imagine if a student read Romeo and Juliet then read a more contemporary book with similar themes and was allowed to reflect on these two books!
My advice to this boy was to find a subject of interest to him at the library, take out a book and learn that reading can be engaging and joyful (and that increasing vocabulary will come from his own dictionary searches). It is a novel idea these days! I asked him what he was currently interested in. He immediately talked about how he liked gaming but that his mother told him it was not good for him to spend too much time with this. He was intrigued because he likes football and found it curious that gaming had become a sport… people actually would sit in audiences and watch talented gamers playing (via wide screens). This boy is clearly engaged in life and would certainly enjoy reading a book about the rise of gaming (or dare I even say a fiction book with the theme of gaming). And god forbid… he might actually use his mind and think without “Coleman’s help”!