Students that I work with actually get really invested in criticizing the adults in the story, and the circumstances. Gen Z / Gen Alpha High schoolers care a lot about like the rights of children and youth, how adults treat them, how external circumstances impact characters pov and actions, and they pick up on all of it, and it’s so much fun every year.
To see kids go from ‘I don’t want to read Shakespeare, love is gross, school is dumb’ to boldly debating who’s more at fault for what happened to Romeo and Juliet, and also other characters like tybalt ! oooh the kids always love tybalt. and they blame Romeo a little for his death, but they also blame the adults, and the culture, and the messaging that both Romeo and tybalt are given as young men.
One student, a struggling reader I was working with, who is also one of our EL students, was completing an assignment this year where for part of a class, students take a character, write a paragraph about how that character would translate to the modern day, and then draw the modern day version of the character. He didn’t know where to start with the writing, so I told him to start with the drawing first, then we would work on the writing together. At first he didn’t know which character to even start with, so I read some of the shorter lines from some of the characters in the most recently assigned section, and I forget exactly what it was but it was something about Tybalt being described by another character, he stopped me. He said he wanted to do Tybalt. I asked him why and how he wanted to make Tybalt modern.
He started the drawing and while he worked, he told me about his older brother who taught him to play soccer, a fast and skilled athlete, who hasn’t been able to play much recently because he took a part time job to help out the family. Who laughs loudly and takes every opportunity to be active, but who also cares deeply for his loved ones and would defend them. He sketched out a (very rough sketch, he’s an athlete at an arts school, he’s doing his best) drawing of a tall boy in a soccer jersey, shin guards, cleats, and wrote in pencil at the bottom, ‘[his brother’s first name] prince of cats’ all lowercase. Then we worked on talking through his paragraph. At the end of class, when students could pick up their phones from the phone holder, he wanted to show me a picture of his brother, mostly joking with me, to try to convince me that he did actually put effort into his very quick very rough sketch. But also probably because I let him tell me about his older brother, who he clearly idolizes, as younger brothers sometimes do.
When the class got to the death scene and were reading and discussing it, this student spoke up and said he didn’t blame Romeo. He wanted to know how were the characters supposed to know that they are defending the same family (since Romeo had married in to the family secretly right before this fight scene) and wanted to know why no one taught them to talk things over first before fighting. He referred to Romeo and Tybalt as family a few times in that discussion, getting so specific about reminding other students that they’re related to each other now, and didn’t get the chance to figure that out because they always have to be fighting.
I think after this year, every time I read or teach R + J, I will always picture this student’s older brother playing the role of Tybalt.
And sometimes the kids are alright.
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