Why Do We Teach Shakespeare?

I played Claudius in a 2006 production of 

Hamlet as part of a grad school course on

Shakespeare, and one of my fellow actors 

gifted me this ridiculous action figure at the 

end of the production.

When I can arrange it and my courseload permits, I try to align my teaching of Shakespeare across my classes so it all happens at the same time. To that end, I recently started my 10th graders on Romeo and Juliet and my AP Literature students on Hamlet. My Shakespeare seminar kind of took care of itself.

Shakespeare is a mainstay of high school English education, and that actually has not changed with the Common Core State Standards, which actually mention Shakespeare specifically in a number of places, both in the standards themselves and in the appendices. So the fact that I'm using Shakespeare plays is hardly a strange choice.

But today, I'm asking my students to set goals for themselves for the Shakespeare units we're doing. Best practices for teaching dictate that students should know the reason they're doing the work that they're doing, so a strong teacher might put the day's objective on the board, or build it into an assignment's directions, or even have a conversation about it. I happen to like also having students set specific goals based on what they want. I find that our goals frequently align, which really helps increase students' engagement and their sense of the relevance of what they're doing. And I also like to read over what students want so I can look for opportunities to adjust lessons and units to give it to them wherever it's feasible.

But this blog post is really about giving myself an opportunity to put my money where my mouth is. I'm asking my students to write about what they want to get out of their study of Shakespeare, so in addition to integrating goals and objectives in my lesson planning, on the board, in assignments, and in class discussion, I thought I'd write a bit about why I think Shakespeare is so valuable for high school students. After all, on its face, it seems a bit ridiculous to emphasize a single writer from ~1600 when talking about teaching for the 21st century.

First of all, reading a play is a remarkably different experience than reading a novel or short story, and Shakespeare provides a particular challenge for a reader in this regard. Unlike novels, plays are written to be performed, not read, so the reader must engage a different set of imaginative tools in order to fill in the blanks that would otherwise be taken care of by the director and the actors. Shakespeare demands particularly strong critical and imaginative skills because the stage directions give only the barest sense of what the actors might be doing (e.g., "they kiss" or "they fight") and no character development at all, in contrast to, say, a Miller play, in which extensive descriptions are embedded into both character introductions and individual lines. Engaging with a Shakespeare play demands a truly active, imaginative reading, in a way that few other texts provide.

Second, Shakespeare plays offer two unique kinds of challenge in the complexity of their language. The reader needs to decipher an archaic form of modern English, and the mastery of that archaic language helps build a reader and writer's toolbox for use in our contemporary form of modern English. Reading Shakespeare trains up your reading and writing skill in a way that's focused particularly on the vocabulary and constructions that aren't as common in the contemporary language we're immersed in. In addition to that archaic complexity, these plays also offer a poetic complexity that can help train up one's skill with elegant, precise turns of phrase.

Third, Shakespeare plays offer characters whose motivations are generally easy to grasp at a basic level, but whose complexity is essentially limitless. As a newer reader, you can immediately understand that Romeo falls in love with Juliet and wants to be with her or that Hamlet wants to take revenge for the death of his father. But, under these basic, highly accessible motivations lie subtle, nuanced, fascinating influences and subconscious streams, all of which can be gotten at through more and more careful analysis of the complex language.

Fourth, Shakespeare plays are fundamental to western artistic culture. Shakespeare created or defined a huge array of storytelling techniques, tropes, and archetypes that help inform an educated individual's view of modern culture. He challenges us on themes that are still deeply relevant to any thoughtful individual trying to function in the world.

So Shakespeare lets us, as educators, hit a wider array of both traditional and 21st century skills than nearly any other source material. It trains up the imaginative abilities, the critical faculties, the analytical skills, the linguistic competencies, and even the philosophical chops of a student, depending on what you want to focus on during a given unit, week, or day.

That's why we love Shakespeare.

I Wish I Had This Assignment in High School

One of the most fun things about being a teacher in a district that supports—or at least allows—creative assignments and curricular choices is that you can use or create assignments that you wish somebody had given to you in high school. I had some wonderful, creative teachers, but contemporary practices in my school system in the 90s would never have allowed for the kind of choice reading assignments I can give to my students now.

Our ninth grade curriculum has "outside reading" as one of its components, and while teachers each implement it in their own unique ways, it typically involves having students read a text independently with little or no class time devoted to it. My implementation of outside reading for the last few years has shifted to allowing students as much choice as possible.

There's no better way to improve your writing than a good book
and the right spot to read it in (me in Auke Bay, Alaska in 2006).

That goes for all levels of students. For strong readers, choice allows them to take some risks in expanding their horizons. Too often, the strong students are crushed with so much work that the joy of reading that made them strong in the first place starts to sap away as it becomes a chore. For readers who struggle, choice is an opportunity to find a book that they might really enjoy, and enjoyment is often the quality that's missing from a struggling reader's world. If reading has always been a source of boredom and frustration, the student doesn't read, and the cycle spirals downwards as the school books become more challenging. Choice can allow the kid to pick something that's genuinely interesting to him or her, which can help break that cycle.

The research absolutely supports the idea that the amount a child reads is a key part of expanding vocabulary, increasing fluency, improving writing skills, and hitting pretty much every goal and standard you could have for a high school student. For all the important work we do teaching grammar, vocabulary, and organization, I'm not sure there's any more effective way to improve a kid's language skills than getting a kid to read more stuff with more interest. Kids who read more also get higher standardized test scores in a way that doesn't suck the fun out of learning. Here's an article from the American Association of School Librarians that gathers together a massive amount of research supporting these findings.

For parents wondering how to improve your kids' SAT scores, ACT scores, CAPT scores, grades in the humanities, college admissions prospects, and all the other metrics that sometimes overshadow the the passion, excitement, and engagement of learning: let the kid read whatever he'll read and support it however you can. If it's in standard English, it'll expand his understanding of grammar, complex vocabulary, and sentence structure. The people with the big vocabularies generally got them from books, not from flash cards.

In order to support kids in this endeavor from within the curriculum, I start the process with the summer reading book. Students write reviews of their independently chosen summer reading books, and we kick off outside reading by reading each other's reviews. We also spent a day in the library with Mr. Neenan (@neenanc) learning about ways to find books to enjoy. We asked ourselves, "what skills and knowledge do you need to navigate a bookstore or a library to find something you love?" and shared our answers with the kids. Also, Mr. Neenan and I both spent some time curating a selection of books on GoodReads we've read and loved or hated (here's mine). So based on all of that input from their peers and teachers, students get to pick a new book that they might love, they review it, and the process continues.

So for quarter 3, students pick a book and blog about why and how they picked it. Then, a review of the book is due in a few weeks. Here's the first step:

Take some time to browse the library catalog, GoodReads, and the library itself and pick a new book for your outside read. Really think outside your traditional choices in order to see if you can find a new genre or style that might fascinate and engage you. You can certainly pick a book from a genre or series that you already know you like, since the most important thing is that you end up with a book you'll enjoy, but you should at least consider the less familiar territory first. 

Once you pick a book, write a blog post that explains why you chose the book you did. You need to be specific. If you're wondering what to write about, use these questions to get you started. 

What specific qualities of the book drew you to it? What ultimately made you choose it over other books? What do you hope to get out of reading it? What do you think you will enjoy? How might this book challenge you?

I wish I had this assignment when I was is in high school. There's a ton of benefit to reading classic books together, and that's still a lot of what we do in English 9, but if I can make some space for kids to become independent readers who enjoy it—at least more than they currently do—I've won bigtime.