Stage Swordfighting

I have been interested in fencing for years, even doing a very little bit of it in grad school at Indiana, and I always use my practice foil as a visual aid when explaining the plot against Hamlet in Act V.  While I wished there were some way other than watching the filmed fight scenes for my students to experience the joy of swords, I really didn't feel expert enough to try to do more.

That all changed on a July afternoon when all the participants of the Folger Summer Academy gathered on its grassy front lawn facing our nation's Capitol, took off our shoes, took up our dowels, and took choreographed swings at one another.  Since that very moment, I have been plotting to do stage sword fighting with my own students.

My first hurdle was figuring how what equipment to use.  I knew I didn't want to use dowels as we had in the Academy.  I kept hearing variations of an explanation about how one wound up shattered and embedded in a student, so I began to search for an alternative with which injury would be as impossible as I could humanly make it.

Dollar Tree to the rescue, once again.  During Halloween, they had inflatable lightsabers.  This, of course, appealed quite deeply not only to the geek in me but also to the geek in my students, so I cleaned the store out and scurried away with my prize.  They were locked safely in my supply cabinet, and every time I opened the door, I grinned at the thought of what was to come.

Finally, second semester started and our Hamlet unit began.  Since weather in Mississippi in the winter is tricky, I booked our auditorium as a backup, but my true goal was the large open green space in the center of our campus.  Despite rain early in the week, by the time we got to the magic chosen day, the temperatures were mild, the ground was firm, and the sun was shining.  The students grabbed their chosen inflatable lightsaber, and out we went.

Just as we'd been taught at the Folger, I lined them up and started with footwork.  The students laughed as they tried to master the stance and the proper movements.  I ran them forward and backward, remembering the sage advice to "wear them out" first.

I showed them the five strikes and blocks, and we practiced.  As we worked, students passed by from other places.  Some of them took pictures.  Some of them stood to watch until their teacher urged them on.  Several of them said, "Man, I wanna take this class.  What is this class?"  My student swordsmen and women fought on.

Once I felt like they had as much of the basics as a 50-minute introduction with an inflatable sword was likely to yield, I told them to come up with a scene for us that they would perform for the whole group.  I walked around and helped out, took pictures, and generally enjoyed what I was seeing.  They were putting together some amazing things.  One group of guys had more background than the others since one is active in local theater and the other actually plays sword sports.  A group of girls incorporated synchronized cartwheels.  One group had two attacking one brave defender, and a group of four girls wound up in a carefully designed free-for-all in which everyone was dead at the end.

It was fabulous.  It was everything I had hoped for all those months ago on a DC summer evening.

We watched each group perform, and everyone cheered.  Snapchat videos were shot.  Selfies were taken.  It was more than a lesson; it was a memory.  Hopefully, they will look back on their senior year at some time in the future and say, "Hey, do you remember that time when....?"

At the end, just as my teacher group had done during the Academy, I had all the students take one of the Famous Last Lines from the packet provided by the Folger, and we all stood in a large circle.  The only instructions I gave them were that they needed to be loud and as ridiculously dramatic as possible as they "died."  Melodrama abounded.  Some went quickly and brutally.  Others drew it out in a way that Bugs Bunny himself would have approved of.  We laughed and laughed.

When it was over, we dusted ourselves off, collected our battered lightsabers, and went back to the classroom. The following day, we watched a filmed version of the final fight.  As they viewed, I saw several of them commenting to their partners about the moves of the fencing.  How could one ask for more than this?

Hamlet Gallery Walk

On January 25th, my AP classes did a modified version of the tone word gallery walk activity we did at the Folger this summer. We listened to Renaissance music courtesy of a couple of really awesome playlists on Spotify including an album from the Folger Consort while the students walked around the room inspecting various artistic representations of Hamlet meeting his father's ghost.  As the students walked, they left a tone word from a list they have as a permanent resource in their writing folders on a post-it near each.

The pictures were diverse.  Many of them came from my research at the Folger courtesy of Luna,
their digital image collection.  One was a cartoon from the collection of Hamlet references I am constantly collecting from various sources.  The final was a painting I had seen in the Pinacoteca in Sao Paulo, Brazil while I was there for a summer program four years ago.

When the students were done choosing their tone words and looking at the words of others, I had them move to stand in front of the one they thought most accurately represented Act 1.4.  They had to talk with others who had also picked that image and be prepared to explain why it was best based on textual evidence. Lots of them "bandwagoned," but all of them had well-supported explanations based on the visual source and Hamlet.

Finally, I broke them into groups of two or three and told them to create a "3-D painting" of the perfect scene to convey the tone they thought the the text indicated. They had so much fun with this, with pulling each other into poses, with getting just the right facial expressions, with explaining how the use of a jacket draped across their head or a foam sword helped to convey the feeling of the scene appropriately.  I took photos of all of them to preserve their work of art, and I put them in our Google Classroom for them all to enjoy later.

As we were wrapping things up and preparing for the trip to the cafeteria, one of the students in my 5th period class said, "Ms. Waters, this was just FUN. I was expecting this class to be boring because, you know, it's reading and stuff, but this was so good. And interesting."

That may be some of the highest praise I've ever gotten. Thank you, Folger folk, for making that happen.

Two-Line Scenes with Faustus

Today, I was finally able to use another one of the strategies I learned this summer at the Folger:  two-line scenes.  Although we had originally done this with Hamlet this summer, I combed through the play we're currently reading, Doctor Faustus, and created a set of lines from it.  Some of them were thematically important. We had the famous "face that launched a thousand ships" and "Man, fly!"  We told each other that this was hell, nor were we out of it....  Some of them were just fun. We burned our books, became apes and dogs, and told each other we could not read. I was eager to see how the students would handle it.

They drew their lines, found their partners, and started scrounging around my room for props.  I have two huge boxes of things I use to dress up my Shakespeare bust for the various holidays, and his costumes got pretty thoroughly pillaged.  I had students in fezzes, in boas made of holiday garland, in goofy glasses, and in a hat shaped like a cooked turkey.  They used squeezy stress balls, sets of National Honor Society cords, and foam swords.  They found sound effects and video clips of flame to use on their phones.  It was fabulous.

They commandeered every part of the room, the front, all the furniture, and even the shower curtains I use to hide all the obnoxious nastiness in my classroom.  One group took a mountain trek over the seats of one row of desks.  That same group finished by lassoed a display clothesline with silver-and-gold-star garland to swing away from the "hell" their line indicated they were in.

I had the best time.  I loved watching them create meaning from the random combination of lines.  With the exception of a few words they wanted to look up (fustian, sixpence), they were independent of everything except the text.  All of them engaged.  All of them had wonderful little vignettes.  We all laughed and cheered at every dramatic effort.

When I told them afterward that all the lines had come from the play we were about to read, they were excited.  They were eager to find out where "their" line was going to come into the larger story.  As a preparatory activity, I don't see how it could have gone better.  It gave us a break from the stress and hustle of the semester's end, and it piqued their interest in the text ahead.  They left the classroom smiling and talking about the experience, reliving it on the ubiquitous SnapChat.  What a great activity!

Not Just for Shakespeare

Today began a unit on Modern literature.  We started looking at Eliot's "The Hollow Men" as a way into the characteristics of the period.  They have been working on Prufrock for a week by themselves.  We will pick up on it tomorrow together, and we'll move from Eliot to discussion of As I Lay Dying and Their Eyes Were Watching God.

I love Eliot.  I always have.  It was probably an early warning sign of future English-teacherdom that I was buying Dover Thrift Editions of his works during my own high school days.

I do understand how challenging he is.  He operated at "god level" when it came to weaving allusions with stream of consciousness and vivid imagery.  Even most of my bravest students are daunted when it comes to dealing with him for the first time.  (Those that aren't...well...lots of them are now English teachers, too...)

As I was preparing copies of the poem for TPCASTT annotation, a thought occurred.  What if I tried the Folger 3-D tactic with "The Hollow Men"?  I was curious as to whether or not the strategy would be as successful with helping my students to shape meaning for themselves with this complex poetry.  It had worked so well with the Seven Ages of Man speech at the beginning of the year.  I piddled and pondered, and finally, I decided to see what would happen.

I did use part of a PowerPoint of Doom this time because I wanted to remind them of the general feelings of despair, distrust, and brokenness that inform Modern literature.  I slipped through it quickly, presented the format of a TPCASTT, and had them make quick notes on their initial reaction to the title.  Then we read through the entire poem with each student taking a line.

They took to the activity with no hesitation, prompting each other if someone got lost.  When we got to part V with its "here we go round the prickly pear" portion, some of them actually caught on and put the tune to it.  One student missed his cue for his line, and he laughed.  "I was singing the song in my head.  Sorry."  The final lines drew a big reaction from everyone, "Hey!  I've heard that before...."  Suddenly, there was a connection with something that had been more or less threatening and unintelligible.

Because I was doing this on the fly and time was short, I asked them to get with partners immediately after that and "see what they noticed."

They started putting big chunks of it together, and I eavesdropped on their conversations.

"They're scarecrows, right?  I see 'heads stuffed with straw.'"

"They aren't real scarecrows.  I think they're supposed to be like people?"

"Everything in this poem is dead.  Look.  'Stone....cactus....dry....'"

I couldn't hide my glee.  It had worked.  One student saw me smiling and eyed me suspiciously.

"What?  Ms. Waters, did I say something silly?"

"Not at all.  Not.  At.  All.  You were dead on.  Keep going."

And they did.

We talked through parts of it today, and they were a little amazed at how much they had understood with just one brief dip into the work.  I saw smiles.  I saw confidence growing.  I saw the same group who had almost without exception raised their hands when I'd asked who didn't feel comfortable dealing with poetry at the beginning of the class suddenly eagerly pointing out things that were dry or purposeless.

Tomorrow, we will start with the portion of the read-through where each person takes an entire sentence as a review before finishing it and moving on to Prufrock.  I can't wait to see how much more they can extract.  The benefits of what I learned this summer at the Folger just keep coming.

Shakespeare in Action

Yesterday, at long last, all the preliminaries were over.  The handbook was covered and tested.  The syllabi were out of the way.  The classroom procedures were established.  It was time for the activity I’d been waiting a month to try.

I gave the students a copy of the “Twelve Ages of Man” speech from Twelfth Night.  Just as the group of teachers had done in the summer academy, the class and I read it together chorally, and I asked them to make notes.

I have to admit being a little nervous about this approach.  It’s worlds different from the way I have traditionally addressed Shakespeare.  Instead of defining all the potentially-problematic words and presenting tons of scaffolding related to history or culture, I was letting the language stand on its own.  The students didn’t even know which character had said it. 

As I walked around, I was thoroughly pleased to see all the students busily marking up their passages, and their notes were insightful and on-track.  No one was fussing.  No one was throwing up hands in frustration.  At this point, I successfully managed to resist the urge to jump up and down in the back of the classroom and clap my hands in glee.  Dignity, people.  Always dignity…. (And if you’ve never seen Singin’ in the Rain, you might not get the full measure of meaning for that quote….)

We read it again with each student reading to a strong mark of punctuation, just as our teacher group had all done when we were reading Hamlet together in DC.  Since reading aloud is a key fear for most of my students, I watched carefully to see how they received it.  Nobody even hesitated, even my shy ones. 

Another round of annotation followed, this time with them being asked to break up the passage into meaning groups or big ideas.  When we talked about it as a class, they all knew that the main theme was the passage of time and the stages of life, and they’d all identified what they were.  I hadn’t helped them.  I hadn’t provided a single translation.  I hadn’t done the endless background PowerPoint of doom illustrating what a “pantaloon” was.  They still got it.

That’s when it hit me.  They.  Still. Got.  It.

Since we have only 50 minute periods, we were reaching the end of our time when I had each group “pick-a-stick” from a numbered collection of popsicle sticks I keep for these things, and whatever number they drew became their “age” to act out in a one-minute pantomime the following day.  I expected eye-rolling or hesitation, but without exception, every student began eagerly talking to his or her partner about what they could do, making lists of props, and looking around my room for things they could use.  As the bell rang, they bustled out full of energy and ideas, already practicing gestures.

Today, we did a final quick review with each person reading just one line before passing it on to the next reader.  Then they put their scenes together, and the creative interpretation of Shakespeare’s words flowed.  One group used a balled-up wad of paper and a quickly bundled hoodie to construct an infant who was then “fed” from a bottle of blue Powerade.  Another group had a black-jacketed death stalking a cane-wielding “old woman” and gently pulling her down.  A third had a group member turn herself into the scales of Justice who passed an owl figurine from my giant collection to another student who drew a beard and mustache on her own face in an action of total commitment to the role.  I have known for years that my students are capable of wonderful things when they do creative assignments, but with as little preparation time as they had, it struck me again how good they are at it and how much fun they had while doing it.

After the acting, I passed out my “fancy” new whiteboards and told each group to pick three of the ages and give pros and cons for each.  After they’d had time to confer, I used the Folger website to pull up the close-up images of the Seven Ages window that had fascinated me so during my time in the Reading Room and the students looked at the individual characters  and related their pros and cons for each as we examined it.  I concluded by asking them to come a consensus as a group about to which “age” seniors belong.  The answers were as diverse as the people.  Some saw themselves as soldiers fighting for fame and honor.  Some saw themselves as lovers.  One group said infants; just beside them, a group claimed to be justices, the pinnacle of knowledge. 

When the bell claimed them again, they headed out the door full of discussion about who was right, swapping evidence and justifications, and my little teacher heart was absolutely full.  Without more than a minimum of assistance - perhaps the defining of two words - they had gotten there all on their own and, most importantly to me, they had made a connection.  I’d seen the looks of dismay yesterday when Shakespeare’s name was mentioned.  All of that was gone as they left.  They’d had a good encounter with the Bard.  He’d been a source of laughter and relevance for them instead of some monolithic obstacle.

Even though I love to teach Shakespeare and look forward to it all year long, today he became something for “everyday use.”  I don’t have to keep him in a special box and bring him out only for fancy occasions or my mega-Hamlet unit.  I can have the joy of watching my students discover him in small doses.  Maybe he can become their solace, too, or at least less of an object of dread or discomfort.

How liberating for all of us.

Shakespeare Is Ready

This bust of Shakespeare was given to me by a wonderfully sweet class many years ago.  It is one of my most prized possessions, one of those things I'd grab if I had to run out of building in case of disaster or fire.  I dress him up seasonally.  Right now, he's wearing the hat I bought at the Folger Shakespeare Library this summer and my Reader badge from my time there during the Summer Academy.  In the words of Muddy Waters, Shakespeare is as "ready as anybody can be."