Most of us have high school memories of reading Shakespeare, whether they be engaging trysts with a reading of Romeo and Juliet or a forced digestion of Julius Caesar. We may have hated or loved the way our teachers taught Shakespeare, leaving a stain or a warm-hearted feeling for the works of the great bard. But, now that we have readied ourselves to teaching Shakespeare in a homeschool environment, we look back at our experiences being learners of Shakespeare. There is an undeniable pressure to becoming the "teacher" of Shakespeare's works, but, I wonder, is one ever only a "teacher" and nevermore the "student" of Shakespeare?
In his article, "Shakespeare Goes to High School: Some Current Practices in the American Classroom," Russ McDonald explores the experience of teaching Shakespeare in the classroom and had interviewed four remarkable teachers.
It should be mentioned that he didn't just pull these teachers out of a hat; these four teachers have practiced at the Teaching Shakespeare Institute which was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
For the homeschool teacher cracking open a Shakespeare play, peeking at the curricula and methodology of American classrooms does not hurt. Rather, we can learn from their strategies and accomodate them to benefit the homeschool environment.
The four teachers, Nancy Goodwin, Martha Christian, Paul Sullivan, and Sheri Maeda, unanimously agree that performance is where it's at! "The preferred method," says these Shakespearean scholars, "is the preparation of scenes by groups of student-performers" (145).
In an overcrowded classroom environment, performance is probably an activity that follows much ice-breaking and disintegration of students' affective filters. However, in the homeschool environment, unbridled performance is easier to achieve. Performing strips the labels of "student and teacher" and allows families to be performers, actors, and audience.
Of course, performing scenes is a huge time-consumer, especially in the public school environment. With some sadness, McDonald admits that "the emphasis on performance has led to the practice of teaching parts of plays" (145).
Luckily for the homeschool community, we have ample time to read, rehearse, and perform scenes. (Think you're wasting time "only" teaching Shakespeare? Read the article about creating Shakespearean unit studies!)
In addition, we can carefully and jointly choose which play to cover. But how do we choose?
Martha Christian would say that Othello is a hit because it "is a powerful catalyst for serious [...] discussion," while others would say that it depends on the students and the mood of the "class" (146).
Paul Sullivan suggests that "it's not the play that determines the success of failure but the teaching methodology." Sullivan stresses the need to become confident "putting the works in the hands of the students and guiding them towards sources or opportunities to interpret and to make meaning" out of the texts (147).
As homeschooling parents. most of us are quite comfortable putting work in the hands of children and seeing what they do with it. The reading of Shakespeare can be an experience where the family holds Shakespeare and guides each other to read it and perform it to the collective vision of the group. But, despite the intimate family connection to Shakespeare's plays, many parents still shudder at confronting the bard's elevated and often puzzling language.
What do I say when my child asks what 'salad days' are? How do I interpret that crazy word that is highly suspected of being a clever pun?
Nancy Goodwin shares the pain: "The biggest problem in teaching Shakespeare is the language barrier" (148). However, Sullivan would disagree: "The language is less of an obstacle in performance-based teaching because there is such a powerful incentive to produce clarity for an audience" (148).
In a homeschool environment, a comfortable performance-based reading environment would also draw out questions about word meaning and usage. Because we're graced with more time, we can double as word hunters and read through footnotes or the OED for reference. Stumbling across a difficult word is also a good opportunity to teach our children how to find the answers they need, whether through careful thinking, analysis, and/or referring to another text (dictionary, footnotes, OED) for assistance.
Russ McDonald also posed the question: To what do students respond when studying Shakespeare?
Martha Christian claims that "[i]ntroductory acting exercises with subtext, subsequent acting, video-scene assignments, and comparisons of scenes in professional videos to their own video scenes" were highlights of her course (148). In the same way, performing Shakespeare in a comfortable environment and creating characters and staging organically can brighten our homeschool experience with Shakespeare.
With all the vast opportunities and "bunny trails" that reading Shakespeare can inspire in homeschool families, it's no wonder that many families focus on one play a year, but thread it through all 12 months as a current outlet for learning. Because Shakespeare's works are so multi-faceted and layered, the possibilities for study are endless.
The bottom-line, unanimous feeling is that Shakespeare is best taught as a collective performance, and the homeschool environment is certainly conducive to that. Children who dream of directing can even manage the camera while budding artists can be set designers if the family is not entirely made up of full-time thespians at heart.
Works Cited
Allen, Genevieve. "Shakespeare Performance 2010 of A Midsummer Night's Dream." Homeschool Performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Forte Academy of Tacoma Piano Studio and Homeschool Classes 19 Nov 2011 http://www.teachergenne.com/index.html.
McDonald, Russ. "Shakespeare Goes to High School: Some Current Practices in the American Classroom." Shakespeare Quarterly. 46:2. (1995) 145-156. JTSOR.
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