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Memories of the Son of Memory (Part XVI): Teach the Text, I Pray You

Drama is a natural part of life, and I don't mean the time spent on stage. Plans are laid and, like those mice and men, often go awry. We soldier on, of course, feeling as though there's some catharsis somewhere, though the curtain seems to have dropped acts ago. It can be difficult to tell if we're living a sequel, prequel, or the main event.
I felt the curtain drop on a cherished aspiration when Justin was fired from his job at Maeser. He and I were planning on working together on a Concurrent Enrollment Shakespeare class that would give college credit to the seniors who participated. We wanted to tackle three or four plays, plus some other, contemporary works, all within a framework of improving the writing.
I'm not privy to the reasons why Justin was let go, but with his departure--and the degree he had--the class had to be cancelled. I was bothered by it, in part because I'd lost a mentor and a friend, and also because a dream of being able to focus exclusively on the Bard--or, near enough, anyway--was going away. I couldn't see how I'd ever be able to pursue a more intellectual, less nuts-and-bolts class of Shakespeare now. My measly bachelor's degree wouldn't allow me to carry a concurrent enrollment class, and the AP tests focus on things other than just the Bard.
One year passed into another and new faces came to the school. One of them was Dr. Marianna Richardson, who (obviously) had a degree that would allow the Concurrent Enrollment Shakespeare class to return. Neither of us had taught a class like this, though she had had experience with college writing as well as the Son of Memory. Together, we hammered together an approach to the class that would satisfy the CE requirements and the itch we both had to really dive into the texts. We selected As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Henry V, Richard III, The Tempest, The Sonnets, Othello, and Macbeth as the primary texts covered.
It wasn't easy. Not only was the focus of our class different than other CE classes, we had problems registering the class with Utah Valley University. Then Dr. Richardson got an offer to become a part time professor at Brigham Young University, which kept her out of the classroom twice a week. It became a feature, rather than a bug, of the class.
See, I would get to circle the desks and chat in depth about whatever act we happened to be in at the time. Then, when Marianna came back, we'd have a lesson on writing, a critique of a paragraph, or some other approach to the curriculum. She'd leave the next day, and I'd jump right back into the plays. Admittedly, it was unfair to her; she was the vegetables, I was the dessert. But it still worked as a class.
I was grateful for the opportunity to learn how to mold kids' writing. I've always written intuitively, and, while I've taken great pains to learn how to write better, there's always been a baseline talent for it. Because it came naturally, it made translating my process into something easily digested by students quite difficult. Seeing another teacher, in a frequent, in-depth way, engaging with the process of writing was reassuring to me.
Partway through the year, I managed to get myself to London and nearby Stratford-upon-Avon. I there purchased a Complete Works, which I used as my primary text for the remainder of the year.
The choice proved fortuitous.
Because the students used the Folger Shakespeare Library edition and I used the Norton International Student Edition, disparities in the texts began to crop up. Where theirs read "ancient" for the appellation of Iago, mine read "ensign"--a fascinating change. By shifting away from the Norton translation, you read Iago as a member of the army without any irony within it. However, going with the Norton edition, there's an irony in calling "honest Iago" an "ensign", or a standard--that is, one who is reliable and can be looked to as a genuine indicator of placement on the field. There's a lot going on, even though the words are fairly interchangeable, in having an ancient as opposed to an ensign.
Other fascinating tidbits came out of my enormous "other baby William". I learned more about Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, the successes of some of the plays, and the gulf of differences between the two versions of King Lear. Information on the conflated text--though not its inherent problems--of Hamlet are also highlighted. In short, it was definitely worth the thirty-five quid.
In my responsibilities of teaching the tenth grade curricula of history and English, I have the duty to teach about the Holocaust. It's not my favorite thing. It's dark, depressing, and just one small snapshot of the much larger whole of suffering that the twentieth century reveled in. I teach it in a very strongly worded, somber way, which definitely affects the teenagers. In fact, this year, I finished my lecture four minutes early (a rarity; I'm almost always ending class on time). I told the students I had nothing left to say and, if they wanted, they could go to lunch.
No one left their seats.
The emotional toll of talking about this sort of thing for four hours straight is fairly large for a person like me, who can't see why we all can't just get along. I tried to be a bit more upbeat during the latter-half of the day, since I wouldn't have to talk about the Holocaust for another year. Still, something was off.
When I arrived in my Shakespeare class during seventh period, though, my students were clapping and shouting in excitement. I had missed what had them amped up, but a quick bit of questioning clued me in: the next day was Shakespeare's 450th birthday.
The class was stoked. They wanted hats and cake and a big party the next day. Dr. Richardson and I both looked at each other and said, "Okay." We liked the idea, too.
We grabbed a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) and, the next day, sat down and watched the play about the plays. The students laughed at a lot of the more esoteric jokes (though, it should be said, the Abridged crew does a really good job of making the plays relevant and funny) and overall we had a good time.
What really mattered, though, was seeing their enthusiasm. I didn't have to tell them the news that Shakespeare's birthday was on the 23rd. They already knew. They were already talking about it. They were already excited. That made a big difference to me on that bleakest of days, because I saw the great binaries of humanity distilled. The misery and despair of hatred on one hand and the uplifting, ebullient power of passion and love on the other. The darkest depths of humanity were explored while some of the greatest accomplishments of humankind were lauded.
That day in life, as in Shakespeare, I saw both "sound and fury" as much as the "paragon of animals", a dichotomy that helped relieve me of some of the burden I had struggled with.
It put a lot of faith back into humanity to see these students enthusiastic about something that is hard, yet valuable. It can be difficult to remember, for me, that Shakespeare is opaque to many people. The very thing I thrill at--his complex language--instills others with concern, apathy, or outright revulsion. They think that experiencing Shakespeare is the same as reading Shakespeare is the same as learning what the stories by Shakespeare mean. But that isn't it at all. William Shakespeare's power--the power that I saw in the faces of my celebrating students--is that of accessing a commonality that links person to person in intimate ways via a shared text. Despite despairing that I'd never have a chance to see that sort of intimacy, I learned that any fallen curtain can again be raised.

One need only have some patience. 

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