It's hard to believe that this is the first post of calendar year 2017! One gets sidetracked with the inevitability of work and all of a sudden four months have elapsed. As it so happens, though, work is precisely what led me to this entry...and even to rekindling a spark that had all but disappeared through the winter.
At the school where I work, we do not use substitute teachers. When faculty members are absent for whatever reason, teachers who do not have classroom responsibilities are assigned to proctor their classes: the dreaded "Please Preside" (although I doubt many beyond this veteran know why they have that odd name). On Thursday of last week, your humble narrator, a math and science teacher by training, was sent off to proctor a section of English III. I had learned on the day prior of the pending responsibility and also of the assignment. The students were to begin reading Act II of Macbeth. I decided immediately to change things. Call it arrogance, call it sensibility, call it nostalgia of seeing the Stratford production last summer, call it a desire to educate. Whatever you call it, they would read the play as a group.
I opened class with their assignment and then told them directly what I believe to be true: Shakespeare cannot be appreciated with a solo, silent reading. We cast scene 1 and off they went. They concluded and then there was a brief summary. "What just happened? What did you read?" Then we moved on to the floating dagger of scene 2, with the same pattern. "What do you think? Is there really a dagger? Can the audience see it, too?" We got through scene 3 as well, and I indulged a bit with an explanation of the porter's speech. "Why is this here? Why do we need a drunken doorman?" One student nailed the idea of comic relief, and then we looked at the text and what was really being said. Being relatively new to the language, they missed a lot of the innuendo. (Those who brought a book to class--sadly not all of them--were using the Folger edition, which does a great job with the explanatory notes.) By the time the period ended, I hope they had a reasonable grasp of Act 2, and perhaps even an interest in seeing a performance of the play.
This morning, I discovered in my mailbox yet another proctoring assignment for yet another absent teacher. (That makes 22 for the school year to date.) Today it was English IV. The assignment: to continue watching Branagh's Hamlet. I wondered if seniors would be able to tell me where they left off. I asked and the response, after some whining, was, "He was talking with the gravedigger." "Oh, you mean Act I, scene 5," I replied. As I rattled off the plot, they were surprised that a math and science guy knew something about Shakespeare. Fortunately, the VHS tape (technology!) was right at the correct spot. We fired it up and played it through until Hamlet died. I did stop it a few times to spot check. "What's going on? How did Hamlet avoid being killed in England?" Again, I noticed that there were difficulties with the language comprehension, but with a little bit of explanation the students were able to figure it out.
I noticed something else surprising about the film. Ugh. Give me a live performance without the schmaltzy background score any day! How could there be any sort of tension with that elevator drudge? And what was with Branagh's slow, monotone recital of the dialogue? How awfully boring! Why had I never noticed this before? It left me wishing that the students could see a real live performance of Hamlet with some honest emotion.
After two English classes in three school days, I wonder where next I will be assigned. I asked the assigner to throw me into an English II class next time. After Macbeth and Hamlet, Othello would be perfectly logical.
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