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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.
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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.
