What Do You Not Know?

November 5, 2018November 2, 2018 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again, one of my favorite things in life is when people come up to me and want to talk about Shakespeare. Especially those people who I don’t normally get to speak with, because makes for an extra bond with someone I would not otherwise have had.

But I don’t know everything, and I hope I don’t give the impression that I pretend to. So very often what will happen is somebody will want to talk about something that I have no idea about, either because I’ve just never thought of it, or maybe because I haven’t even read the play they’re referencing.

You ever find yourself in that situation? What do you do?

Personally I welcome it. I’ll say without hesitation, “You know, honestly? I don’t know. I’m not familiar enough with that play. But it’s an excellent question, and now I want to find out the answer.” And typically I’ll turn to you good folks and ask for you to education me, so that if the question ever comes up again, I’ll have thoughts on the subject. A reason for me to learn more about my favorite subject? Yes please! It’s one of the reasons I’m reminded that I really do love this stuff and I’m not kidding myself. Nobody makes me do that. I do that because I want to do that.

How about you? I figured out a long time ago that many of the people that read my site are much smarter than I am, and usually have the answers to my questions. How often do you run into the situation where somebody asks you a question about Shakespeare where you’ve got nothing? Do you hem and haw and hedge and try to fill in the blank? Or do you just come right out and say, “I have no idea”?

Assuming that this does happen sometimes (i.e. that you don’t know everything), do you care to fill in those gaps in your knowledge? Or do you just walk away from the encounter without really giving it much thought?

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The Complete Works In A Tweet? No, Not Really

November 2, 2018November 2, 2018 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Although this story will be old by the time it gets posted, I would not be living up to the geek part of my name if we didn’t talk about the UK student who managed to fit the complete works of Shakespeare into a single tweet. At least, that’s what the headlines would have you believe:

To be or not to be 280 characters: All of Shakespeare’s works in a single tweet

Someone just tweeted the entire works of Shakespeare with one tweet

You can unzip this tiny image on Twitter to reveal the complete works of Shakespeare

You get the idea. That last one at least gives more of a clue about what’s going on.

Here’s a link to the original tweet from David Buchanan.

It contains a link to a small image of Shakespeare (Chandos style, for the curious who can’t see it) with the words UNZIP ME over the top.

If you’re not familiar with the term, a zip file is basically a compressed version of another file, or files. What Mr. Buchanan figured out how to do is make a single file that behaves both like an image and a compressed zip archive at the same time.

So if you were to take that image (right click from your browser, do “Open in Image New Tab”), and then save the image by itself with a .zip extension, and then double click on it to expand the archive, and what you’ll get is the single file HTML version of Shakespeare’s works, from Project Gutenberg.

Is it a cool technique? Absolutely. Even better is that Buchanan went on to release the source code for how he did it. So I get to do cool things like this:

This image is actually encoded with the plain text version of The Tempest (also from Project Gutenberg), in case you’d like to play with it. Save it with the extension .zip, then unzip it, and there you have it!

If you know how to read source code it’s even cooler, because the code to do it is very small (as in, just one file). It’s very neat indeed, and Mr. Buchanan deserves the credit for demonstrating the technique so vividly. This is a great example of why geeks are attracted to Shakespeare, because it represents a big body of text to play with that immediately brings a bunch of attention with it every time you touch it.

But saying that the complete works fit into a single 280 character tweet is not really what happened. The image is linked in the tweet. The image itself is 2 meg in size! That’s kind of like putting a First Folio in a room, locking the room, then handing someone the key and saying, “You’ve got the entire First Folio in the palm of your hand!” It does sound cooler that way, though.

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Teachers, How Do You Feel About Your Hermiones?

November 2, 2018November 2, 2018 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

No, that’s not a Winter’s Tale reference. That’s a Harry Potter reference. Psych. 🙂

So once again my oldest has an actual Shakespeare class, and once again it’s not really living up to what we’d hoped.

They’ve started The Tempest. Here’s my daughter’s (roughly paraphrased) summary of the first day:

We did Act One, Scene one. It’s frustrating, because she asked us no questions. Zero. I’m sitting there, waiting for this, I know the answers. I’m dying to say Sycorax, I love that name. But she didn’t interact with us, she just told us what happens.

That makes me sad. I once wrote an entire blog post about that scene, and how awesome the boatswain is. So let’s talk about the situation this teacher finds herself in.

I’m sure that teacher has to assume that there’s zero amount of Shakespeare knowledge in that class. It would be a waste of time for her in most classes to ask a question like, “Is anybody familiar with The Tempest?” because 9 times out of 10 she’s going to get blank stares and silence. So why bother?

Because in this instance she would have gotten an answer. My daughter’s hand would go up. As it would with every question (hence the Hermione reference). She could assistant teach that class.

She’s not trying to be a teacher’s pet. On the contrary, she’s generally an introvert who will avoid answering questions because she feels that for her to answer it is to not give others a chance. But to not even have the question asked? That seems like an opportunity missed. It would not be a lie to say that she’s been waiting years for opportunities like that.

Maybe the teacher knows that. She’s well aware of my daughter’s experience with Shakespeare already. I know because I’ve also had that conversation with her. So I figure one of two things must be going through her head:

a) she’s completely forgotten, or just generally disregarded, the knowledge that she’s actually got someone in class this time that knows the material. She’s got a plan, it does not assume a Hermione in the class, why change the plan?

b) she’s deliberately not singling her out to keep balance in the classroom, and not elevate my daughter into some sort of favorite. Maybe she’s even doing that for what she believes will be my daughter’s benefit, so that the others don’t see it as a negative (i.e. teacher’s pet syndrome)

My problem is that I see it as the opposite. Let’s pretend for a moment that there’s more than one kid in that class that already knows the material. Or at least would be willing to hazard a guess at some questions. And all of them are afraid to be the first one to raise their hand. Doesn’t it make sense that if you know you’ve got a student who isn’t afraid to raise her hand, and knows the answer, that you should do that? That maybe it would help bring the other kids out of their shells? Maybe there’s kids in that class that would hear my daughter rave about how awesome Shakespeare is, how she’s known about it since she was little, and maybe they switch from “I’ve always heard that this stuff is boring and irrelevant” to “One of my peers is telling me that it’s interesting and not that hard, maybe I should listen to her.”

Teachers, help me out here. I’m trying to read somebody’s mind, and maybe I’m way off. It doesn’t matter the particular material. Say that you’re in the out of the ordinary situation where you know you’ve got at least one student in the class that knows the material ahead of the rest. How do you handle that? Take advantage and try to use that kid to draw out the others? Or treat everybody the same? Why?

(In fairness I should acknowledge that there’s an option (c), namely, that this class is about monsters in British literature and thus they are studying Caliban specifically, not the play as a whole. So, since scene one really has nothing to do with Caliban, she glossed over it. I mean personally I still disagree, because I think that kicking off the story in an exciting way rather than a blah blah blah way is important if you want to keep the kids’ attention, but what can ya do. There are calendar time restrictions, and material to get through.)

This month’s posts are sponsored by No Shave November. If you’d like to support the site and help raise cancer awareness, please consider a donation. All profits from advertising, merchandise and book sales are being donated. Direct donations can also be made at the link. Thank you for your support.