The sixth-graders I’m working with are studying figurative language now, so we looked at figurative language in a scene from Antony and Cleopatra. They enjoyed the “salad days” metaphor, and the exchange where Cleopatra asks her servant Mardian about what it’s like to be a eunuch.

Cleo. Hast thou affections?
Mar. Yes, gracious madam.
Cleo. Indeed!
Mar. Not in deed, madam; for I can do nothing.

In other Shakespeare teaching news, I met with the eighth-graders who are doing As You Like It, and it looks like I will be working with them after all. And I’ve also hooked up with an enthusiastic seventh-grade class that has already read Hamlet, Much Ado about Nothing, and Romeo and Juliet. It looks like I have a few online classrooms to set up.

More to come!

I’m to win an electoral district’s last call;
When you dribble again after palming the ball;
I am handling a tune; I’m transporting a haul;
And I’m wearing a weapon for what might befall.

Who am I?

UPDATE: Riddle solved by Asher. See comments for answer.

We just reached 60,000 hits. Huzzah!

The 60,000th hit came in from the UK on January 19th, 2011 at 7:42pm. The visitor followed a link from The Bard Blog.

At this point in time, the blog’s Technorati authority is 123, ranking 27,873.

Once again, many thanks to all who have visited, and continue to visit. And with the increased traffic to the site lately, can 70,000 be far behind?

So I have a Twitter account now. I haven’t really been Tweeting very much, but I could start, like, any minute now.

If you want to follow me, you can find me here.

“Follow me, the wise man said.
But he walked behind.”

Leonard Cohen
“Teachers”

In this somewhat new blog feature, I will offer up a question from the statewide examinations that New York City students take each year. The purpose of this will not be for you to try to provide the correct answer, but rather to join me in examining the question. What does it tell us about student understanding? What do each of the wrong answers mean? What is this question testing? What is it really testing? What would students need to know and be able to do to answer this question correctly?

I gave a workshop for data teams on Friday. Three of the groups were examining last year’s 4th grade ELA scores, which I knew meant that we’d be talking about Abigail. In my visits to schools, I’ve found that students who took this exam had a lot of trouble on questions relating to this poem (click to enlarge):

Students had trouble on a number of the questions, but we will just look at one: Item 21 on the 2010 New York State Grade 4 ELA Exam:

The intended performance indicator is “Make predictions, draw conclusions, and make inferences about events and characters,” but we can be the judge of that.

What is this question testing? Does it fit the performance indicator? Which of the wrong answers would you predict students would choose the most often? Why? What would students need to know and be able to do to answer this question correctly?

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.

Every now and then 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 readers to this site in the past week.

Enjoy!

Well, there is a bit of sexual content in it. Iachimo bets Posthumous that he can seduce Imogen, Posthumous’s wife. To prove he’s won his bet, he describes Imogen’s body in intimate detail.

But why do we flinch at mild sexual content like this for kids, and shrug off graphic violence? Does anyone ask if Macbeth is appropriate for kids?

I just did it myself. When asked if Cymbeline is appropriate for kids, I immediately addressed a verbal description of a female body, and completely ignored the decapitated corpse on stage.

I addressed the same concern when I taught the play to 8th graders. In the end, they did very well with it. You will have to let your own moral compass guide the way.

It depends on how deep you want to go. I have taught Macbeth in one lesson; I’ve taught it over an entire year. I’d recommend at least a month, but you’ll have to see what fits in your curriculum.

There’s plenty of inhumanity in the canon to go around.

My vote is for King Lear, though I suppose Titus Andronicus would be an appropriate choice as well.

Unlike other war-themed plays of Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing does not seem to center on any actual historical war. Directors, therefore, have the freedom to set the play in any post-war period that strikes the fancies of their set and costume designers. Of course, directors of Shakespeare hardly need such an invitation.

In the play, Don John has stood up against his brother Don Pedro, so the Civil War is a good choice. But really, the war itself is such a small part of the story that any war will suffice, even the indeterminate war of the text.

There are some organizations, like Flocabulary and The Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, that use rap music to teach Shakespeare. But my favorite Shakespeare rap is still from the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s three man show The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (abridged):

Full disclosure: Back in my acting days, I performed in this show. I played the role of Daniel (the first guy in the video, wearing red pants), and performed in this rap. The play is rather silly on the page, but turned out to be a great audience pleaser.

UPDATE: The embedded video doesn’t seem to be working right now. Here’s a direct link.

Hamlet, prince of Denmark, died yesterday from complications from a wound by a sword laced with a deadly unction. Some sources reported his age to be 30, while other sources insisted that he could not possibly have been that old. He is survived by nobody. King Fortinbras is requesting that any flowers sent on behalf of the deceased are of a botanical variety that have deep symbolic and/or ironic meaning.

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

Inspired by yesterday’s post.

From Antony and Cleopatra:

Does thou not see the baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Bosoms bury the snake’s unsheathed teeth, test Cleopatra’s beauty.

I didn’t work with the kids this week on Antony and Cleopatra, so instead I offer some fun facts about the historical Cleopatra.

First of all, she wasn’t Egyptian, at least not by descent. Egypt was one of the lands that had been conquered by Alexander the Great. When Alexander died and the empire dissolved, Egypt fell into the hands of one of his generals, Ptolemy Soter.

For generations, his family ruled Egypt, with the kings carrying the name Ptolemy and the queens carrying the name Cleopatra. They remained Greek, though, and never assimilated with the Egyptian people. Isaac Asimov compares the relationship of the Egyptians to the ruling Greeks “as the natives of India once were to the ruling British.”

The last Cleopatra, our Cleopatra, was actually Cleopatra VII. She had a son with Julius Caesar, named Ptolemy Caesar (but called “Caesarion”), and several children with Marc Antony. She also married her two brothers (for political reasons) but had no children with them.

Shakespeare’s account of her death by a self-inflicted wound with a poisonous asp seems to be based in historical fact, but it was Shakespeare who changed the location of the bite to Cleopatra’s breast, rather than her arm. This added even more spectacle (and a bit of sexy) to an already epic death, and allowed the immortal line “Does thou not see the baby at my breast,/That sucks the nurse asleep?” Man, that guy could write.

Anyway, I think I’m back with the kids next week, and may even be starting the previously mentioned As You Like It project as well. Watch this space!

I’m an ill-fated serve in a pro tennis game;
The short circuit a glitch in the system became;
I’m a character defect; I’m culpable blame;
And a break in the plate that can shake the Earth’s frame.

Who am I?

UPDATE: Riddle solved by Asher. See comments for answer.

I’ve gone back to tracking site hits, in preparation for bringing back the popular Googleplex feature on Sunday. That may or may not happen, since a lot of the searches I’m seeing are either very straightforward or repeats of searches I’ve used before. The repeats make me smile, though, because this time, the searchers are actually finding what they came looking for.

I’m noticing one big difference between the source links now and those of a year ago. Many of my hits are now coming in via Twitter, which is a relatively new development. I can’t see who links here on Twitter, so if you’ve been retweeting my posts, I thank you.

I’ve also been getting a lot more traffic in the new year. My Technorati authority is now 118 which ranks me at 36,240, while just two weeks ago, I had an authority of 108 and a rank of 56,666. I guess the increase in posting is paying off, though a lot of the impact seems to be coming from one post.

Sixty thousand, ho!