Last semester, the Benchmark Exams that we must give per county orders were such bad tests and such horrible measures of student knowledge and skills that the county gave us a pass on the test this semester. Since my previous school was a "guinea pig" for the Benchmarks, this is actually my 5th year giving these tests. My current school only started giving them last year, so it's all still very new to most of the teachers. I thought I'd been well trained by my county (since I've never taught anywhere else, and don't know any better) to follow the pacing guides, reading schedules, reading lists, and testing schedule that they determined would be "best." Each year, I find myself feeling rushed, anxious, and frazzled in the attempt to kee up with the county's schedules. However, without the threat...er, deadline...of Benchmark Exams looming over my head, I'm finding that I actually enjoy coming to school, and am as excited as a first year teacher to teach lessons each day!
In past years, as I may have already written, I taught A Midsummer Night's Dream to my SOPH LA classes. This is the Shakespeare text that was chosen by the county as being best suited to sophomore students. According to the pacing calendar, I had to teach this play--and all AKS (our county's standards) associated with the unit--in about 3 weeks. Now, this might be possible if I taught Honors students who had the maturity, ability, and motivation to do some reading at home by themselves; but I teach ESOL and collab. CP, and these students are not going to (and often times CANNOT) read alone at home. So, everything we read, we must read together in class. It is impossible to teach a Shakespeare play this way in 3 weeks. So, I never had time to fully explain, practice extention activities, or assign end-of-the-unit projects. It was all too much.
This semester, though, we are on our 4th week of studying Julius Caesar (I've posted previously why I decided to do this play instead), and we are reading Act III, Scene 2 together today. The students are totally into it. They want to know how Antony will exact his revenge on the conspirators for the death of his beloved Caesar! I am under no pressure to hurry myself through the unit, and it is great. Even more wonderful, though, is that I'm making time to teach EVERYTHING I'm supposed to teach while we are reading this play: grammar with bell ringer Daily Oral Language activities; writing with weekly and bi-weekly chunk paragraphs based on topics that pertain to the scene we are currently reading in the play; literary terms like monologue, soliloquy, aside, stage directions, etc.; sonnets (an activity inspired by this lesson plan from Folger); persuasive techniques (activities inspired by 2 other Folger lesson plans); and a love for literature that these students have never known before. I think that's pretty amazing stuff.
That really IS amazing stuff! Teaching Shakespeare is my favorite thing in the entire world (obviously, lol), but I must say that I never had as much satisfaction teaching Shakespeare as I had when I taught it to my private ESL student. His family was from Korea, and I had worked with him and his little brother for about two years (learning BASIC words, which was intimidating for this first-time tutor) before he turned to me and said, "Why do you love Shakespeare so much?" I decided to show him instead of telling him. In the course of about another year and a half (working together for 3-5 hours a week), we completed "Romeo and Juliet," "Macbeth," "Twelfth Night," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Othello," and "Much Ado About Nothing." We read every word together, alternating lines so that we never "talked to ourselves" as we read. We had so much fun, and I felt so rewarded as an educator. Each time, I let him pick which play we read (after I gave him a brief synopsis of a selection of plays). By the end of our last summer together, he was going into the ninth grade and he said, "You know...we're reading 'Romeo and Juliet' in LA this year." I looked at him and smiled and said, "Yeah, but you already read it. In English. In Shakespeare's English." The grin on his face was worth more than words can express.
ReplyDeleteWorking with non-native speakers taught me how to better teach my native speakers. I learned new strategies for explaining dramatic material, as well as more efficient methods of providing historic context. My tutee and I got to the point where I found myself explaining individual words less and less (he understood "thou" and "ere" for instance), and we got more to the point where we could start tackling complex thematic issues.
There's something wonderful about teaching Shakespeare to students, and something even more wonderful about teaching Shakespeare to students who believed they'd never ever understand it.