Reflective Blog # 3
Future Classroom:
Tension has come to a slow boil as Hamlet now understands the gravity of his situation: He must either forfeit his life and love or avenge his dead father at the cost of his own life. Die for what has been done, or live for what is yet to be. This is the plague of the modern thinker stuck in a world of one-sided thought. Revenge must be had. Old rivalries are new rivalries. Hamlet draws his weapon against Laertes, a friend and a fellow slave to revenge. There is no path that leads to the future of Hamlet. The blades are poisoned. Fate is sealed.
*Students watch from the crowd. Hamlet and Laertes cross blades. Only the students know the blades are poisoned. “Don’t do it!” they cry with a faint voice that doesn’t escape the crowd. Moments later the characters that students have watched for three acts lay dead on the floor. The simulation is terminated, and students truly feel the gravity of Hamlet’s position. The stone court of King Claudius is slowly replaced by the neon classroom. Students are left with their thoughts as they disconnect from the Shakespeare server.
“What did you see? What happened?” I ask the students.
“Hamlet was killed by a poisoned blade,” they reply.
“So, why did Hamlet choose to avenge his father rather than live for himself? Did he ever have a choice?”
Students ponder what was just seen. Plays are meant to be watched, lived, and felt. The elephant and the rider take equal interest in the events. Emotions are high because the story has been told.
Alright, enough with the theatrics. I want my students to virtually enter the world of Shakespeare, and feel the full emotional gravity of the play. While we may be far off from virtually reality that is immersive and graphic enough to capture a student’s attention, I think it would be an awesome experience to live through a play as an era-specific observer (hopefully complete with garb and all). I picture the future classroom as a space where emotion meets practice. Dirksen continually emphasizes the importance of making a lesson personal in terms of feelings using storytelling. Even though I do enjoy plays, sometimes era specific language is a distraction. I only notice this when reading, however. Something about visualizing a play really brings it to life. The language that was once unintelligible becomes everyday banter. I definitely see where emotion has a very large role in uniting elephant and rider.
Speaking for myself, sometimes it’s hard to believe that I even have a rider. The elephant is hardcore. Like, seriously, I want to have fun all the time. I want to use writing to create vivid new ideas versus hashing out what someone may or may not have meant in their writing that they wrote over eighty years ago. Students are likely to feel the same way, even if they don’t even have the tendency to want to write. When I’m emotionally invested in a subject, I find it is easy to pay attention. It is challenging, however, when I couldn’t care less about what I’m learning. For example, we just finished a reading a play titled Top Girls in my literature class. It was a drag through the mud because I wasn’t invested. Personally, I care more about the fates of Lego’s fictional Ninjago characters than these largely unlikable fictional characters from the play.
I want to run a classroom where students are invested in learning for the sake of application. The English language is a valuable tool for crafting an argument and backing it up. I want to make the matter personal, asking students how they would feel in situations we read about in texts. For example, if you were in Hamlet’s position, would you feel you owe a debt to your murdered father, or would you feel a drive to run from a potential suicide mission to take down your evil uncle? Perhaps you would feel both a need to avenge your father and live a life that isn’t pre-defined by your family circumstances. These are questions that speak to the rider of the elephant, and make a lesson worth wrestling an elephant for. Part of the beauty of literature is putting the reader into a situation that is unfamiliar. That is, to cause some cognitive dissonance to form new associations, and then explain why these associations make sense based on former experience. I want to experiment with lessons that are their own rewards. Perhaps having students answer questions based on moral dilemmas will be a valuable trick to make learning feel more personal. As long as I get the elephant’s attention, the rider won’t be far behind.