#teaching chronicles

Many of my schoolmates were heavy drinkers and partied hard since they were 14 and I don't even drink now that I'm legally allowed to. C'mon, I'd arrive monday morning asking them how was it this time to get in with the fake IDs and laugh with them about their stories. Never felt like joining them. Their parents have always put it as me being some sort of "golden child" that was particularly easy to raise, but truth is they were either just like that as teens or they were religious themselves but never payed much attention to their kids.

it all started with her (and a couple others) complaining about how they’d have to read Romeo and Juliet in the spring, and I responded by basically saying, “I know, it sucks. It’s not his best play by far.” Which, of course, compelled them to ask what was his best play.

I responded by saying his best comedy is Taming of the Shrew, which in many ways is one of the first haters-to-lovers stories we have. That got their attention, of course.

One student in particular (we’ll call her Ally) really loves that trope, and I showed her the scene in which Kate and Pertruchio meet. She struggled with the language at first, but I walked her through it like this:

Pet: Myself am moved to woo thee for my wife.

Kat: “Moved,” in good time! Let him that moved you hither / Remove you hence.

Here, she is basically responding to his proposal by saying, “Whoever brought you here can take you back now please >:)”

This of course made Ally laugh (it’s funny, after all), and she proceeded to take the 10lb anthology from my hands and read the rest of the scene, pausing every once in a while to ask what something meant. (If you convince students that there is great entertainment lying at the bottom of comprehension, they’ll do the work needed to get there.)

Fast forward a few weeks, and Ally has told me that she has gotten used to Shakespearean English (she still struggles with vocab, but the syntax has become familiar). I pointed out to her that everything is written in iambic pentameter (every line has 10 syllables with alternating accents—unstressed, stressed). Ally’s mind was BLOWN. (If I had told her this while teaching Romeo and Juliet in the spring as a side note about Shakespeare in general, you can imagine she would not have been nearly as interested.) She then proceeded to recite lines FROM PURE MEMORY and counted the syllables (I was flabbergasted), and found that the lines indeed held 10 syllables each. I revealed to her that people in Shakespeare’s time didn’t actually talk like how people do in his plays—so even back then people probably struggled through comprehension sometimes. She appreciated their company.