my absolute favorite few days of the school year happened this week… the sixth graders started shakespeare. bear with me I have a lot of thoughts about this!!!
everyone in middle and high school here spends the last nine weeks of the school year reading one shakespeare play in english class. we read the entire play out loud, in class, pausing often to talk about it and puzzle out the lines and words and what the characters are doing and thinking. kids volunteer for parts at the beginning of each class period. they do weird accents. they put real emotion into it. I read nothing except the stage directions. it is, amazingly, nearly everyone’s favorite unit. at the end of it, they do projects and write papers and put on a filmed adaptation.
the seventh through twelfth graders start out excited, because they (for the most part) did this the year before and they know that shakespeare is fun. they love it. they ask for weeks beforehand when we’re going to start shakespeare.
the sixth graders, however, are new to the middle school and new to shakespeare. they are scared!!! they think shakespeare’s language is not their own. they think it’s too complex and/or boring and/or will go over their heads and/or very serious.
in the first two-ish days, something magical happens: the sixth graders lose their fear and fall in love with shakespeare. watching it in real time is a gift.
this year we’re doing macbeth. I ask the sixth graders on thursday, day 1, when and where shakespeare lived, what kind of writing he’s known for, etc., to get a sense of what they know (very little). I give them like a five-minute rundown of macbeth and shakespeare but nothing in-depth: I want them entering the play at the level of language.
for the first couple days I put the play on the smartboard as the kids get used to how to read the lines, then we switch to physical copies for everyone. this means there’s no glosses at first, nothing to check for meaning or context — only the lines themselves.
1.1 of macbeth is super short; we read it straight through, with three giggling girls reading as the witches and stumbling over their words, and then go back to parse out the lines. I ask something like, “what do you think hurly-burly means?” the sixth graders give a variety of replies: craziness, trouble, chaos, hullabaloo, and I get to show them a gloss that says basically exactly that. they laugh at weird-sounding lines, they get used to how it should be read. their confidence ticks up because they see now that the language of shakespeare is not some crazy inaccessible building to be scaled. it’s a playground!!! they can go right in and have fun. the learning curve isn’t even that steep. and mind you, we’re still in 1.1! we’ve only barely started.
on day 2, they’re cautiously excited. maybe the beginning was just like that? we were eased into this and it’ll get harder?? then they fully relax and get into it over the course of the class period. they argue over who’s going to read for what part. a kid who has not been doing great in class, rarely volunteers in discussions and even more rarely reads anything aloud, throws his hand in the air when I ask who wants to read for today. he asks to be the “bleeding captain” and proceeds to give an amazing and totally sincere performance of an injured man delivering news to a king. it’s the most he’s spoken in a given class period.
it does require rigorous work and attention to be in sixth grade and read and understand shakespeare. we pause A LOT to talk about the lines and what they’re saying. we look at A LOT of glosses. what bowls me over is how quickly they acclimate, how excited the sixth graders get for that work. not because it’s important to learn or whatever but because it’s fun and interesting!!! they love it. and it took 100 minutes of class between thursday and friday.
