A Year in the Life of an English Class

Today we lost one of the great voices in American language and literature.  Personally, I remember reading her novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I was in ninth or tenth grade, and then coming back to it when I was starting to teach high school.  I was drawn to her writing by its immediacy and its truthfulness.

The biggest lesson that I remember from Ms. Angelou, however, is a very wise aphorism that I try to remember as a teacher:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” 

I really believe that this one is completely true.  I can stand up and try to explain literature until I’m blue in the face, and no matter how hard I work, I probably won’t reach many students in a meaningful way.  But when I find a way for a student to feel the joy of reading something beautiful, or to experience the thrill of finding something interesting in a piece of writing — and sharing it with others — I know that the student will leave my class with a gift that she’ll always remember.    Below she is pictured giving a graduated address to George Washington University.  I don’t have any idea of what she said, but I did find more wisdom on a poetry website.  I like to think that she shared this one with the graduates:

“I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.”

Today I’ve been gratified to see so many people publishing their goodbyes and their memories of Ms. Angelou on their facebook pages, and it’s been a particular thrill to see former English students of mine sharing their memories of her work.  I’m not much of a scholar, so I’ll leave the real work of eulogizing Ms. Angelou to better, more capable minds.  Here are some links:

The NY Times Obituary, written by Margalit Fox

NPR’s Obituary by Lynn Neary

The Guardian’s Mary McCorquodale makes a case for including I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings in British schools.

So here we are…

You’ve completed the requirements for graduation, and you’re walking out of this school with a diploma.  Or maybe you’re not… but regardless of whatever hoops you have or haven’t jumped through, you’ve reached an important milestone:  the end of school.  You can say goodbye to childhood.  For those of you who came from a different part of our planet, I’d like to say thank you for taking a year or more to learn about my home culture and language.  You took a big risk in coming here to live and learn.  I’m sure that you experienced many challenges during your time here. To all of you who have reached out to someone from a culture different from your own, congratulations!  You’ve chosen to make your lives a little richer by sharing yourself with someone else.  In order to make the world better, we all need to follow your example.  And to those of you who have been in my classes for the past three or four years, thank you.  You have taught me lessons in humility, in patience, and in life.  I’m a better teacher now than I was when we began this trip together, and you are the reason why.

Before you leave, I’d like to share a few things that I think are very important.  Thanks for indulging me.

• Literature Matters.  It presents humanity at its worst and at its best, and it instructs us in how people feel.  Literature puts us inside of someone’s soul and allows us to live, for a time, that other person’s joy and suffering.  Looking back over four years, I remember discovering how cruel and evil people can be to each other in Lord of the Flies.  We watched Romeo, Juliet, and Friar Lawrence all reach too high, hoping their romantic dreams could win out over the petty quarrels of intractable enemies, and we saw how easy it was for a hero like Othello to become a victim of his own self-doubt.  We saw Gatsby soar to unimaginable heights of wealth and crash down to nothing when confronted with the cruel reality that he wasn’t born right.  Macbeth crashed in a similar way, and for me, his loneliness — while perhaps more deserved, was no less profound or sad.  We’ve seen how war can bring out unbelievable heroism and unspeakable sadness, and numbing regret, from the World War I tragedy of All Quiet on the Western Front to the lives of a 20th century platoon in Vietnam.  We watched people try to do the right thing — both Antigone and Creon — and how sometimes, as hard as we try to do good things, the opposite happens.  We have walked with some of the greatest heroes of all time, seeing Odysseus on his quest to return home, and Gilgamesh on his quest to discover the secret to eternal life (spoiler alert:  there’s no such thing).  We’ve also seen the much smaller quests of  Holden Caulfield and Willy and Biff Loman and, of course, the metamorphosis of young Gregor Samsa, who are all confronted with the reality that their lives are not “epic,” and that they’ve allowed themselves to be defined by what other people think they’re worth.  The theme got repeated this year in Merchant of Venice, and I hope that you noticed how difficult it can be for the wealthy outsiders (Antonio and Shylock) the wealthy insider (Portia) and for the people who try to play them all (Bassanio).  We also saw, on the other hand, that even a low-life, unfeeling, selfish nihilist like Meursault can wake up and defiantly stand up for life. After all of these difficult, and often sad stories, I’m glad that we ended the year with Master Harold and the Boys.  Sam suffers, but he gets to keep his dignity, and I think that Hally is bound to learn his lesson… eventually.  Besides which, we already know that at least to some extent, there’s a happy ending to that story.  And I believe that there will be happy endings in your futures, too.  Well, there you go.  Four years of English in one paragraph.  Hope you enjoyed the summary!  If you didn’t, well, I hope that some day you’ll give literature another chance.  I also hope that this class offered something to those of you who didn’t feel the direct benefits of the books.

Shakespeare's words are where the power lies.  Your students' active connection with these words is the greatest gift you can give them.

–Peggy O’Brien, Director of Education at the Folger Shakespeare Library

We teach Shakespeare so that students can experience Shakespeare’s Language.  Everything the students do, therefore, should bring them INTO the text.  Mashups are a technique to do just that.

Why Mashups?

Shakespeare wrote at the turn of the century.  Not 1999, not even 1899.  It was 1599.  So his language sounds different.  Our Students Can Deal with That, if we let them!  Often, however, in a misguided and counterproductive effort to make the texts “accessible” to students, we ask students to “translate” the scenes into modern language — or we provide them with these translation.  Doing so actually DISTANCES students from Shakespeare’s language.  Notice how far out “in the suburbs” paraphrasing falls in the illustration above.  Paraphrasing, if done as an end in itself, takes students away from the text and makes them worry.  They’ll worry about getting the translation “right,” or they study someone else’s modern version so that they remember the “correct” interpretation.  Rather than trying to “paraphrase” or “translate,” students have to bring themselves INTO the language.

So here’s an idea:

Rather than trying to drag Shakespeare forward, let’s bring ourselves to Shakespeare.  By bringing our own thoughts to the text — or by bringing lyrics or literature from our own time into contact with the Bard’s words — we connect to the text.  We see nuances of language that make Shakespeare Shakespeare, and we recognize multiple possibilities for performing the play.

Example 1 — Mashing Text with Subtext

No matter what people say, they’re often thinking something different.  Lady Macbeth tells her husband to “look like th’ Innocent flower, but Be the serpent under’t.  One way to bring students INTO the text, then, is to invite them to consider what the character is thinking but not saying.

Here’s an example.  Click here to see it on its own page:

In order to insert the character’s thoughts into the dialog, students have to know the context of the conversation, and they have to have a strong sense of its literal meaning.  By sharing their ideas of what the characters are thinking (without the obstacle of trying to get a “right answer”) they have to come back INTO the text — in order to justify their ideas and ultimately act out the conversation.  The comment feature of Google Docs works great for this exercise, because students can work simultaneously on the same excerpt, and their work can be public to the rest of the class and beyond.

Example 2 — The Modern Lyrics Mashup  

Back when I was closer to my students’ ages, I viewed the English teacher’s job as “explainer in chief.”  In this role, I tried to allude to pop culture to help students see relevance.  Now I let the students find their own connections.

Here’s a link that includes some examples of why my students did with the assignment.

In the left column, the student has a conversation between Othello and Desdemona.  It comes from the point in the play where Othello, convinced that Desdemona has been unfaithful to him, accuses her and strikes her.  On the right side, he has the lyrics from “Harder to Breathe” by Maroon 5.  Just by putting the two texts together, the student is already explaining the passage through analogy.

It gets even better when he combines the two:

Shakespeare’s lines (in blue) stay intact.  The lines from Maroon Five (in black) provide commentary.  When students explain their choices (both of the selections from Shakespeare and their modern lyrics) they connect their own experiences with Shakespeare’s language.

In the process, they Forget that Shakespeare is hard to understand.

Both of these exercises invite students to bring themselves into Shakespeare’s world and experience the characters and language in a way that is natural and relevant to them.  The natural connections that students discover are powerful ways to draw them closer to the texts.

And the ability to share these connections with others can transform the students into guides.