My son is the last of my three still in middle school. As both of his sisters passed through his current grade they both read Romeo and Juliet, to mixed experience. I’ve been waiting to see if he’ll get to read it at all.
Son: “So I guess we’re not doing Romeo and Juliet this year.”
Me: “What? They decided for sure? How come?”
Son: “Nothing romantic anymore.”
Me: “Huh?”
Son: “I guess we’re not reading or studying any stories this year that have romance in them.”
I am assuming that he’s mostly misinterpreting some sort of ban on PG-13 material, perhaps.
Me: “Well that’s fine it doesn’t have to be Romeo and Juliet. That’s basically why schools do Julius Caesar in the first place, no romance. I can write to your teacher and suggest Julius Caesar, or maybe even Macbeth…”
Son: “I think we should do King Lear.”
Me: (impressed) “Bold move. You really think that in middle school kids will be able to understand King…”
Son: “I know thee not, old man.”
Me: …(not so impressed anymore)…”Oh, dude…”
Son: “No, I know that’s not from King Lear. That’s from Falstaff. I was just saying I want to see that play.”
Me: “Oh, ok, phew. For a minute there I was going to say you just made the blog, but you know what, you just made the blog anyway!”
Still have to write to his teacher and see if I can keep Shakespeare in the curriculum!
I know this is a little late for a New Year’s post but I’ve been kind of busy 🙂
This year we decided to do family night for various reasons. We passed on several invitations and decided to just stay in, get some Chinese food, maybe binge watch some shows and play some board games.
Skip past the bingeing (on both Chinese food and High School The Musical The Series) and nobody really wants to dig into a cutthroat game of Monopoly, so I get an idea. I go get my Shakespeare Trivial Pursuit cards! We never get to play this, but I’ve got an idea. I’ve got all my family here. I know what I think they know. So I pick cards, and I read the questions I think they know the answers to, to see how much they’ve learned over the years. Keep in mind that recently we’ve been to Stratford, been to the Folger twice, seen several plays, and they’re all old enough at this point to have studied at least some Shakespeare in school.
They did surprisingly well! Questions on Romeo and Juliet were the most obvious and came out like homework questions. But the real fun was some of the non answers…
“What is the nickname of visitors to the Globe Theatre who stood for the whole performance?” “Oh! Potatoes!” “What?” “It’s something about potatoes! Isn’t it? Something like that.” “Groundlings?” “Right, yes. Groundlings, potatoes. Same thing.”
“What are the names of Hamlet’s ‘friends’ who are summoned by Claudius?” “Oh! Oooo! Umm… something…. hydro something…..” “Guildenstern!” “Yes! Hydrostan and Guildenstern!” “??? Are we in chemistry class?”
And my favorite one…
“What play was being performed in 1613 when the Globe caught fired and burn down?” “Macbeth!” “No.” “Hamlet.” “No.” “Tempest?” “No. You’re just guessing.”
At which point my son, my youngest, who hasn’t taken his face out of his phone, says, “All is true.”
There’s a pause. My girls are waiting. I look at them. “Henry VIII, also known as All is True. He’s exactly right. I just have no idea how he knew that.”
He looks up, realizing he’s the center of attention now. “We saw that one.”
“No, we didn’t,” I tell him.
“Yes we did,” he says. “It opens with a fire.”
It’s at this point I realize he’s talking about the movie All is True, about Shakespeare’s life in retirement, which we saw earlier in the year, which indeed does start with the Globe burning down. Hey, whatever works for him!
I wish I could remember more of their answers, it was a good time indeed. Nobody knew that Prince Escalus has a name. But they remembered that “I know thee not, old man” is said to Falstaff, that the Folger is in Washington, D.C. and a whole bunch of other “that was definitely not on any homework you ever had” questions. I was pretty pleased with the results! Hope we get to do it again soon.
P.S. – My son really likes that scene, I overheard him playing Youtube clips of it before he went to bed last night. He also asked me if he should watch the entire movie or if he’d be bored. I thought he still might be a little bored, but agreed that there’s some good battle scenes.
UPDATE: Fixed typo, of course the Globe didn’t burn down 7 years after Shakespeare died, my brain must have been thinking I was talking about the Folio.
My kids’ interest / attention span when it comes to Shakespeare has waxed and waned over the years, to be sure. Although my youngest, my son, was running around quoting Hamlet when he was about 4 (and not realizing what he was saying, or why I enjoyed that so much), his interest in all things academic or educational has definitely waned throughout middle school. Some days I can’t tell if he’s tired, uninterested, or just trolling me.
Me: “So when we arrive in Stratford we might have the chance to see some special stuff like we did at Folger. What kind of stuff would you want to see if you had the choice?”
Him:Â “An airplane.”
Me: “An airplane.”
Him:Â “Yes.”
Me: “I don’t think they have airplanes at the Shakespeare Birthplace, given that they were invented in America in 1903.”
My younger daughter is studying Romeo and Juliet at the moment. We’ve been over that play so many times over the years that for the first few lessons I learned that she wasn’t even reading the book, she was just going from memory! Unfortunately she had her events out of order and was getting them wrong (Mercutio and Tybalt do not fight in Act I Scene 1…) but that’s not the point of this story.
Driving to school the other day…
Geeklet: “We have a Romeo and Juliet quiz coming up.”
Me: “You going to crush it?”
Geeklet “I think so.”
Me: “Should we study?”
Geeklet: “What kind of nut does Queen Mab ride around on?”
Me: “I have no idea. But we could find out.”
Geeklet: “It’s a chestnut, isn’t it? I think it’s a chestnut.”
I’m driving, so I ask Google assistant to pull up the Queen Mab speech. My oldest is sitting in the front seat so she reads. “See if you can find anything about a nut in there,” I tell her.
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
Geeklet: “Oh. I was close.”
Me: “Wait, so, is that actually a question you’d be asked? What kind of nut?”
Geeklet: “Oh she’ll definitely ask that, and if you get it wrong you’d get the whole question marked wrong.”
Me: “That’s stupid. Ask about the point of Queen Mab, or why Mercutio tells us about Queen Mab, or what that tells us about Mercutio’s character. But to get quizzed on that level of detail? That entire speech is nothing but that level of detail! Children, children – please, what kind of *bone* is Queen Mab’s whip made from? Hmm? Anyone? A grasshopper? No, I’m terribly sorry, the answer we were looking for was cricket. Cricket bone. You fail.” Maybe it’s just to prove they read it. Great – prove they read it by translating it into their own words or something. That would show significantly more comprehension, rather than pure word by word memorization.
So instead we turned the rest of the drive into a lesson about why Mercutio is awesome.
Geeklet: “He’s the one that starts the fight with Tybalt, though, right? Because he was defending Romeo.”
Me: “That’s why Mercutio is awesome. He’s a poet *and* he’s a fighter. He’s that guy where, if there’s a party and you weren’t gonna go, then somebody says, “Dude, Mercutio’s gonna be there,” you’d be all, “Oh, sh*t, Mercutio’s going? What are we waiting for!”
Geeklet: “Isn’t he also a drag queen?”
Me: “You’re thinking of the 1996 Romeo+Juliet movie. But they were all going to a *costume* party. Everybody was dressed up. Mercutio just kind of got into the spirit more than some others.”
My kids like Shakespeare because we talk about the characters like they’re real people. If you’re supposed to like them we talk about why, and if you’re not supposed to like them we talk about why, too. I don’t quiz them on perfect recall. Half the time I get my quotes wrong, too.
But most kids who have to study Shakespeare in school don’t have me. Nor do they have a parent who plays the same role. So they’re stuck with whatever’s asked of them in class. And if all that’s ever asked is to memorize, there’s never going to be any appreciation.
(In my daughter’s teacher’s defense, I am not in the class, and I have no idea if my daughter’s description is accurate. My point is still valid, though, because it’s how she sees the class. She *thinks* that is the kind of thing that’s expected of her, and that’s enough to have her spend her time studying the trees rather than appreciating the forest. Perhaps that’s indicative of a larger problem with the default way that students go into classes like this? As far as I know, her teacher never gave any indication that this sort of memorization was expected – my daughter just assumed it.)
Both my two oldest now are studying Shakespeare — Othello for one, Romeo and Juliet for the other — so the content comes so fast and furious it’s hard to keep up. My oldest has to write a paper on Iago, in fact, because they finished the play when I wasn’t looking.
“That’s what I was going to tell you,” she says. “I had to look something up about Iago for research … and you came up. That was weird.”
Sure enough, if you Google “Othello’s ancient” here’s what comes up:
The funny thing is that there in the car I said, “It means his right-hand man, right?” Which is exactly what I wrote in 2011. And she said, “No, it means flag bearer,” which is also what I learned in 2011 🙂
