I haven’t had much time for the blog this week, since I’ve been working at the Teaching Shakespeare Institute, a week-long intensive study course for teachers of Shakespeare. Shakespeare teachers, if you will.

I’m really exhausted, so I’ll just say for now that my fellow instructors are all extremely talented and professional, and the teachers taking the course are passionate and dedicated. It’s been such an incredible pleasure to work with them all this week.

And I see that Shakespeare Teacher Special Feature II has been almost entirely completed in my absence. Most excellent. The STSF was supposed to replace the weekly features, but now that it’s solved, I may decide to post a new riddle tomorrow morning anyway.

But for now, I’m going to bed.

Via News on the Rialto:

The results are in for the 2007 National Shakespeare Competition for high-school students:

16,000 students and 2,000 teachers from across the United States participated in a curriculum-based program designed to help high school students develop their communications skills and appreciation of language and literature, through the study, interpretation and performance of Shakespeare’s monologues and sonnets.

The winner was Adam Brown (17) from the Youth Performing Arts School in Kentucky. He performed Sonnet 130, a Shylock speech from The Merchant of Venice, and a cold reading of a Berowne speech from Love’s Labour’s Lost. And thanks to the magic of the Internet, we can watch his winning performance.

You can see videos and read interviews for all of the finalists at the New Globe website. Man, sometimes I love the Internet.

I’ve been getting a pretty good response to some Shakespeare writing assignments I posted last week. Those of you looking for more assignments may enjoy the following.

About five years ago, I taught a graduate course on teaching Shakespeare. As part of their course requirements, students had to choose three out of nine assignments to complete during the semester. If more than one assignment involved choosing one of the plays were were studying, they had to choose a different play for each assignment.

Please choose three of the following assignments:

1) Choose a dramatic scene written in the twentieth century. It could be from a play, movie, television show, cartoon, etc. Rewrite the scene as though it were written by Shakespeare. Try to stay as faithful to the original as possible while remaining consistent with Shakespeare’s poetic style and period.

2) Identify ten references to Shakespeare in contemporary American non-theatrical popular culture. Each reference can be a play title, quote, or character, but not simply a word coined by Shakespeare. The references must be made during this semester (periodicals published, movies in the theatre, first-run television shows, political speeches, etc.) Describe the original context of each reference and evaluate its appropriateness.

3) Imagine that you are a screenwriter, and have been asked to write a modern-day movie based on a Shakespeare play. Choose one of the plays we’re studying this semester and select a modern-day setting and characters for the play. Describe the updated story scene-by-scene. What modifications are necessary? What essential elements remain?

4) Imagine instead that the movie studio has chosen to do a Shakespeare play in the original, but with big-name celebrity actors. Choose your ideal cast and edit three key scenes for production. Explain the rationale for your choices.

5) Choose one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Approach the play as a dramaturg and compile a comprehensive research file that might assist a production company in performance.

6) Choose one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Approach the scene as an education specialist and develop a resource guide for teachers who want to teach the play.

7) Choose one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Compare and contrast two published versions of the play (e.g. the Folger and the Arden). Be sure to discuss their treatment of the primary source materials (such as Quartos and Folios). Choose two versions with differences sufficient to make the assignment meaningful.

8) See a live production of one of the one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Write a 3-5 page essay describing the choices made by the production in interpreting the text.

9) With at least one other person, prepare and present a scene from one of the plays we’re reading this semester. (minimum 15 lines each). Memorization is required. In a one-page essay, describe your reasoning for choosing this scene and the approach you intend to take in interpreting it.

Nobody chose Assignment 2 because they thought it would be too difficult, but as the semester wore on, they were kicking themselves because they started to realize how ubiquitous Shakespeare references are. And the course was at NYU, so Assignment 8 was not a problem logistically.

Needless to say, I got some really great stuff back. Giving creative assignments like these makes learning more fun for both the student and the teacher. Plus, it helps discourage plagiarism.

Which assignments would you have chosen? What assignments could I have added to the list of choices? How could these assignments be adapted to make them more appropriate for high school students?

I just gave an assignment that might be of interest to readers of this blog. It’s for a graduate course in English Education, so the students are all either currently English teachers or are studying to be. This is an extra-credit assignment for students who need to make up for missing class, but other years I have assigned it to everyone.

1. Translate a scene from Shakespeare (minimum 36 lines) from Shakespeare’s Early Modern English to our American English of the 21rst century. This should be a line-by-line translation.

2. Take a text that was written in the last ten years (most likely a song) and annotate it for an audience reading it 400 years from now who might not understand our idiomatic language or our cultural references. Please choose a text that is conducive to this activity. Minimum 14 footnotes.

3. Write an original piece in iambic pentameter. It can be anything you want, as long as it’s one cohesive piece that is at least 14 lines of iambic pentameter.

4. Discuss your experience completing these three activities and your assessment of their value as assignments in the English classroom.

Does anyone have anything to add to the list? I’m not looking for more work to give my grad students; I’m just starting a brainstorm of writing assignments that would give high school students a broader view of Shakespeare.

Here’s a good example of a high school English teacher using a blog to post and collect student assignments. This is one sample assignment for students in the middle of reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Your assignment now is to take this mixed-up love mess and bring it to a conclusion with a happy ending. As it stands right now, everything is messed up and needs resolution. Assume the role of a narrator and finish the story. This is your chance to predict how this all turns out in the real play.

The students can now write a response to this and read what others have written as well. It seems like a lot of this is going on at home, but as more and more schools adopt one-to-one computing environments (something I’ve personally been very active in for the past year and a half), the more this sort of thing will become commonplace classroom practice.

This presentation from Karl Fisch has been making the rounds.

Students entering kindergarten this September will graduate from high school in 2020. How will the world be run then? How old will you be in that year? It’s not really that far off, is it?

Discuss.

One question that kept coming up in the Shakespeare in American Education conference was “Why Shakespeare?”. Why does this one author out of all of the other authors deserve such a place in the canon? Why spend valuable instruction time in school working on Shakespeare? Is Shakespeare useful in teaching other subjects, or is Shakespeare a topic worth studying in its own right?

Can the answer be agreed upon in the same way as “Why arithmetic?” or “Why writing?” pretty much can be? Or is the answer to “Why Shakespeare?” too ineffable to be codified in that way. Can there ever really be an answer? And if there can’t, how can we justify teaching it?

Of course, all of this begs the question, and you may choose instead to answer in the negative. Is Shakespeare’s popularity a result of a social and political construction, and not based on the merit of the work? Is there some grain of truth to the high school student’s suspicion that it’s all just a scam? Is there a more deserving candidate, or is the elevation of a single individual counter-productive to the idea of a canon?

Nevertheless, I ask you…

Why Shakespeare?

Well, the conference is over and it was fantastic. We focused mostly on pedagogy today, so I felt a lot more in my element. We also talked about the changing nature of the canon. Yesterday we did a lot of 19th century historical analysis of Shakespeare instruction, which was fascinating, but made me feel like I had a lot of catching up to do. (And when I do that catching up, I now know to start here.)

Anyway, I’m still processing it all. I’ll probably blog more on the conference when I return to NYC, but until I get back, please enjoy this video. In line with the theme of the Shakespeare classroom, here are a very young Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie showing us how it’s done:

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!