The Shakespeare Teacher is out. It’s your move.

Today’s challenge is based on the Googleplex feature.  Normally, I provide search terms that lead to this site.  Now, you will.

The challenge is to find a search term that returns this site as the first hit on Google.

You may use quotations marks to narrow the search.  For example, “Thursday Morning Riddle” returns this site in the top two spots and most of what follows.  But in a search for Thursday Morning Riddle (without the quotes) this site doesn’t even make the top ten.

The results can be surprising.  This site is first in a quoteless search for Shakespeare Teacher.  And I’m not even in the top twenty for Shakespeare Anagram, quotes or no!

Entries are due by March 10.  I will return and choose the most creative or surprising entry.

You may have noticed that posting has been light lately. Now, I’m going to need to step away from the blog for about a month. I would like to call upon my readers to help keep the ball in the air until I return.

I used to read a magazine called Games, which had a regular feature called “Your Move” that featured puzzles submitted by readers. Building on that idea, I now turn this blog over to you.

Every five days, I will post a challenge or prompt related to one of my regular features. (Actually, I’ve already written them and they are scheduled to appear every five days. Even this post was written days ago.) I’ll post a Shakespeare passage; you make the anagram. I’ll post the answer; you write the riddle. And so on.

I will return on March 11 and will select the best entry for each challenge. As always, winner gets a name check in the post.

I may stop in from time to time to make comments and/or delete spam, but the next live post will likely be on or after March 11.

Today being Monday, I’d like to begin with the Question of the Week. There’s no challenge here, but I’d like to invite you to peruse past questions and revive an interesting discussion that has petered out. You can also keep an eye on the comments, either in the right-hand side bar or the RSS feed, and join in a conversation revived by someone else.

It’s your move. Have a good month!

I subscribe to a service called “SiteMeter” which allows me to see a limited amount of information about my visitors. One thing that I can see is if someone finds my site via a Google search, and what they were searching for.

Once a week (or so), I check in on what searches people have done to find themselves at Shakespeare Teacher, and to respond to those search terms in the name of fun and public service. All of the following searches brought people to this site in the past week.

shakespeare teacher

At long last, this site is the first hit in a Google search for “Shakespeare Teacher” which means that it’s the default for the “I’m Feeling Lucky” option. So you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky. Well, do ya, punk?

president died reading macbeth

Abraham Lincoln didn’t die while reading Macbeth; he was shot in the back of the head while attending the theatre. The play wasn’t Shakespeare, but the assassin was Edwin Booth’s brother, so that’s close enough.

Lincoln was a huge fan of Macbeth. Five days before his own assassination, he read aloud passages from the play that dealt with Duncan’s assassination to the Marquis de Chambrun. These passages haunted him, much as the chilling coincidence has the power to haunt us.

what does tudor have to do with shakespeare

The Tudors were a dynasty of English monarchs that rose to power when Henry Tudor defeated King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 to become King Henry VII. The line ended with the death of his granddaughter Queen Elizabeth I in 1603.

Shakespeare was born in England in 1564, during the reign of Elizabeth, and therefore spent most of his life living under Tudor rule. There are also Tudor connections in two of Shakespeare’s history plays. Richard III ends with Henry VII coming to power, and Henry VIII is the story of Elizabeth’s famous father.

what message doesn’t macbeth seem to getting from this last vision?

I’m not sure. The last vision is, I believe, the show of eight kings, and it seems like Macbeth gets the message: Banquo will be the father to a line of kings. However, Macbeth does go on to try to change his fate, which doesn’t seem to be possible in this world, so maybe that’s the message Macbeth doesn’t get.

My take is that he understands the prophecies, and accepts them as long as they are to his advantage, but when things go badly, he decides to take matters into his own hands, trying vainly (!) to usurp fate as he had usurped so much else.

anagram of venice

Evince!

how to begin teaching shakespeare

Great question! Usually if I’m teaching Shakespeare, I’m teaching a particular play. If students are new to Shakespeare, I don’t jump into the language right away. I try to structure activities that interest students in the world of the play, the themes, the characters, and the plot.

When I am ready to introduce students to Shakespeare’s language, I do so by giving them a speech from the play we’re about to read, as well as the lyrics to a popular rap song. We then compare and contrast the way language is used in both texts.

I leave the task of responding to the remaining search terms to my readers:

what rule did shakespeare change

how shakespeare affected Galileo

why was shakespeare so successful

a physical description of puck the mischievous sprite

henry the eighth for 10 year olds

shakespeare’s idea of humor

This blog turned two years old yesterday. Right now, it has a Technorati ranking of 453,743, with an authority of 13. As of midnight, New Year’s Eve, there were 525 posts in 62 categories, and 1,573 approved comments. The site also had 27,055 hits. Many thanks again to all who have visited and also to those of you who have joined in the fun.

I haven’t been around much in the past week, so I’ll post a light Googleplex today. All of the following phrases are search terms that brought people to this website in the past two weeks. As always, I invite readers to respond.

how did shakespeare change history

king lear in present day

greek tragedies for teens

how many days did it take shakespeare to write macbeth

who did king henry the eighth love the most

teaching shakespeare to the elderly

I’ve decided to celebrate the end of 2008 here at Shakespeare Teacher by selecting my favorite post from each of the last twelve months.

Enjoy!

January: Question of the Week

The question was simple: “Who is today’s Shakespeare?” The answer was not so simple, but led to one of the most interesting discussions the blog has ever seen. Aaron Sorkin, David Mamet, Joss Whedon, Steven King, and Bob Dylan all got their day in court, but can there ever really be another?

February: Hey Nineteen

This was a short month that was shorter on posts, but I did enjoy this one. President Bush’s approval rating had dropped to an embarrassing 19%. An old Trident ad once boasted that four out of five dentists recommended sugarless gum. Bush was less popular than sugared gum among dentists.

March: Bad Clue

Due to my obsessive Shakespeare pedantry, I noticed an error in a Jeopardy! clue. It did not affect the outcome of the game, but I was happy to see the error noted in the J! archive, using the identical wording I used in the blog (which I had also posted to the Ken Jennings message board).

April: Shakespeare 24

Riffing on the title of a global Shakespeare event, I put together an hour-by-hour plot summary of a fictional season of 24, using Shakespeare plots, characters, and devices. If you know both sources, it’s pretty funny. A later attempt at a Greek Tragedy 24 was too “on the nose” to really be funny.

May: Shakespeare Anagram: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

In the last act, Theseus is asked to choose a play from among four choices. I did an anagram for each of the four play titles looking for secret messages, and lo and behold, there was a message in each of them claiming authorship for Sir Francis Bacon. A later anagram clarified that it was all just a dream.

June: Pic Tac Toe in 3D, Part IV

It’s not easy fitting 49 themes neatly in a puzzle, and I’ve often had to rely on some weak connections to make it work. This was the first 3D puzzle where I felt that all 49 themes were strong and interesting. And based on the 70 comments in the thread, the puzzle was a hit with solvers as well.

July: Shakespeare Anagram: Hamlet

This is far and away my favorite of all of the anagrams on the site. I took five of Hamlet’s most famous speeches and adapted each of them to be a perfect anagram of the first 14 lines of the “To be or not to be” speech. Links to the originals are included, so readers can see how close I was able to come.

August: Thursday Morning Riddle: Special Edition

The blog’s 100th riddle had a self-referential answer: 100. Neel both solved the riddle and guessed the meaning. In the comments, I promised “Next week: Riddle 101!”, meaning that it would be the 101st riddle. But when the time came, I couldn’t resist, and the answer to the following riddle was 101!

September: Shakespeare Anagram: Henry VIII

In celebration of Shakespeare’s pro-Tudor slant on history, I took the unlikely speech in Henry VIII where Henry reacts to the birth of his daughter Elizabeth, and anagrammed it into something much closer to what he actually would have said. Something about this one really tickles me.

October: Shakespeare Anagram: Henry IV, Part Two

There’s not much to choose from in October, but I was pleased with this anagram. Henry IV is giving advice to his son about how to conduct himself in the next administration, and the anagram is about an interview with five former Secretaries of State, giving advice to Obama.

November: Top Ten Reasons to Vote

I made a commitment to post every day in November, so there’s a lot to choose from, but I think I’m proudest of this one. Did I convince anyone to vote who wasn’t going to already? Probably not. But I think for those of us who do vote, the post was a nice reminder about why we do. It was for me.

December: Shakespeare Lipogram: Hamlet

I had so much fun with the lipogram experiment! The Hamlet lipogram wasn’t the most difficult (Measure for Measure was), but I spent more time on it than any of the others. It’s just not Hamlet without the speeches, and adapting those took a little extra effort. But it was a labor of love.

Happy New Year!

I registered the domain shakespeareteacher.com years ago, but never did anything with it. Eventually, I let it lapse, and someone else picked it up. I always regretted doing that, but apparently I am in good company, since the new owner never did anything with it either and let it lapse as well.

I picked it up again in December 2006, after unsuccessful attempts to procure this domain (as well as this one and this one). I purchased the domain and hosting services for two years, which are set to expire by the end of the week.

I’m happy to announce that I have extended my lease on this piece of virtual real estate for another three years, so Shakespeare Teacher: The Blog will have a home until at least December 2011. I’m also working on some other resources for the website that I hope to announce soon.

Yesterday, I gave a workshop for teachers on using data to improve student achievement. This is something that is going to become an increasing part of my work, so I may be blogging about it from time to time. The idea is to cull information about students from a variety of sources, systematically analyze that information in order to identify areas of improvement, and then create an action plan for targeting those areas.

In some cases, the results of careful data analysis can be surprising. So often we jump to conclusions about why students aren’t achieving, or we depend on underlying assumptions that may be based on our own pre-conceived notions. Consider for a moment this piece of student work:

Laugh if you must, but it’s easy to get the wrong idea from only a cursory examination. Further investigation revealed that the child’s mother works at Home Depot, and is here depicted selling snow shovels. And if you only relied on your initial observations and didn’t investigate further, you could be lead astray.

Hopefully, the systematic use of data will allow us to avoid such snap judgements and take a more scientific approach to improving student achievement.

It’s time once again to check in on what searches people have done to find themselves at Shakespeare Teacher, and to respond in the name of fun and public service. All of the following searches brought people to this site in the past week.

googleplex fridaysThis feature happens to share its name with the headquarters of Google Inc., located in Mountain View, California. I have no idea what goes on there on Fridays.

how come king james didn’t like macbethI don’t grant your premise, unless you are referring to the historical figure and not the Shakespeare play. In fact, you might say that the play was actually written specifically to appeal to the new king. Witches were a fascination for James, so he’d have been intrigued from the start. Also, James was a direct descendent of both the historical Malcolm and the historical Banquo. Notice that the witches make a prophecy that doesn’t actually come true in the play, which is an odd dramatic convention. They prophecy that Banquo will not be king, but will instead be the father to a line of kings. Later, Macbeth is shown a vision of eight kings along with the ghost of Banquo who points at them for his. The eighth king is meant to be King James, as he is the eighth king in the house of Stewart. The prophecy doesn’t come true in the play; it comes true in the audience.

presidents with the letter xSo far, it’s just Nixon, but the night is young.

shakespeare film 2010You do realize you’re skipping over a whole year, right? No interest in The Tempest with Helen Mirren as Prospero? Not anxiously awaiting the new Hamlet with Screech and the Chocolate Rain guy? Okay. From what I can tell, the Shakespeare film event of 2010 will be King Lear with Anthony Hopkins in the title role and Naomi Watts, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Keira Knightley as his three extremely beautiful daughters. Also, Eddie Murphy – I kid you not – is planning to do a version of Romeo & Juliet. I imagine he will be playing both roles, but that’s pure speculation.

shakespeare king henry lambasts halI was amused to see this one because I used the phrase “lambasts Hal” in my first Shakespeare Lipogram, and I chose the verb because it only has the vowel “A” in it. But I wonder if you’re really looking for that scene from Henry IV, Part One, or if you’re actually looking for this scene from Henry IV, Part Two. It’s one of the great scenes from one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known works and was even listed as #38 on my Top 50 scenes in all of Shakespeare.

Hal finds his deathly-ill father asleep, assumes he’s dead, and takes the crown off with him. When he returns, the King’s awake, and lambasts Hal. They reconcile, and Henry gives his son advice for how to be king. The language is… there’s no adjective I could use that you wouldn’t say “Well, yeah, it’s Shakespeare” but the language is particularly rich and evocative in this scene. I did an anagram of a quote from it a while back, but I’m surprised I still haven’t done the most timely quote of them all: “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds/ With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out,/ May waste the memory of the former days.” It’s even got a “Q” in it. I’ll have to save that one for a rainy day.

is macbeth is worth readingMost definitely. I suggest gathering a group of friends together, dividing up the roles, and reading it out loud. Trust me on this one. That’s how to read Macbeth.

I leave the task of responding to the remaining search terms to my readers:

why is shakespeare is one of the founding fatherswhat did the tudors bring back to England

was shakespeare a teacher?

slings and arrows on demand time warner

which president read macbeth before he die

how did shakespeare die on youtube

 

Regular readers of the blog will be familiar with my friend DeLisa, whether she’s posting a spirited comment, solving the toughest riddles, or even providing material, she’s been an indispensable member of the Shakespeare Teacher community since the very beginning.

But those of us who know her can attest that her contributions here only scratch the surface of what she could be offering to the hungry Internet. We have begged her to start her own blog. Finally, she has answered our wishes.

You can find the wit and wisdom of DeLisa on her new blog, appropriately titled DeLisa Online. Memorize it. Bookmark it. Subscribe to the feed.

It may very well become the second most intriguing blog on the Internet.

From Richard III:

Come; I have heard that fearful commenting
Is leaden servitor to dull delay;
Delay leads impotent and snail-paced beggary:
Then fiery expedition be my wing,
Jove’s Mercury, and herald for a king!

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

I entered the legal raffle contest by adding a nerdy note to Duane’s savvy blog.

Playing referee, he picked it randomly, and I won a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Arrive! I’m excited! Hallelujah!

Context here.