Shakespeare+Reflections

I know that this initial response is to have us all tell how terrible our experiences were with Shakespeare, how dry and terrible our teacher's made them, and how we need the Milners and Tolaydo to save us from having the same fate with our students. But honestly, I loved Shakespeare. The first I ever did with him was in my ninth grade English class with that great teacher I keep talking about, where we read //Romeo and Juliet.// He made me so fascinated with the play and about Shakespeare himself that I was excited when we read //A Midsummer's Night Dream// later that semester--I even remember thinking it was hilarious. In 9th grade. We read it aloud in class, with students taking the roles of different characters. He would stop us every once in a while in order to have us almost sum up what just happened, and to clear up any of the language that didn't make sense anymore (my peers of 14-year olds would all lose it whenever a character would yell "ho!"). I still remember being excited that I knew the Nurse wasn't in the last scene because she was the comic relief and the play was a tragedy. From there, I was always excited to read the Bard, and have even gone out of my way to see his plays performed.

That being said, I really liked the ideas that Tolaydo put forward. Starting the class off by performing a scene repeatedly would not only be educational, but also really entertaining for the entire class. I can see this being an activity that everyone will end up enjoying a lot, and one that dispels the myths of how dull Shakespeare is to actually show the excitement of seeing his plays performed. Not only this, it helps later on when students need to discuss more complicated scenes in Shakespeare's plays. Using what they learned from a simple and humorous scene like the one in //A Midsummer's Night Dream// and then putting those same strategies on, say, the final monologue from Puck will really help students to see more complexity then they would have before.