Enthusiasm Begets Enthusiasm

I taught King Lear for the first time a looooong time ago, at Rowland-Hall/St. Mark's School, and then I had to abandon my favorite play for twelve years. I moved from high school to middle school, and friends told me I could not teach King Lear in middle school, that they would not understand it, that it's a play for adults, not children.

Fine. I'm open to compromise and the input of my peers, so I taught the proper middle school plays. I taught The Tempest and Twelfth Night and I Henry IV, and Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet. I played by the rules. I believed the hype. I did my best to love those plays as I love Lear.

But my love was misplaced, and then...last year. Last year, I was in the middle of a short story unit with my 8th grade, and they were bored. I was bored. We were all bored, and I got desperate. I needed a secret weapon, a work of literature that I loved with all of my heart, something I could get excited about.

And there it was, on Amazon.com. King Lear, Oxford Series, for $9.95 a copy with free shipping. And oh, have I mentioned how I love King Lear? So I asked them, "Would you rather continue with this short story unit or spend the rest of the academic year reading King Lear?" It was Lear by a landslide.

Teachers can present works they are dispassionate about all they want - I have had to do it - but my students can tell, and they end up caring less. If there's something a teacher loves, and is enthusiastic to share with her students? Fuggedaboutit. Teach that. Teach that every time.

Teacher enthusiasm begets student enthusiasm. Today, I collected King Lear reading journals and the students presented their creative projects. I first assigned this creative projects in 1999, and I have loved every presentation since then. Last year's decision to teach King Lear is described here, but this year's assignment is below, for your viewing pleasure. The assignment is to represent the storm on the heath - both the external and interior - in some sort of visual presentation to the class. Last year's offerings are here, and here are a few of this year's offerings:

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Something Comes From Something

Friday was the last day of classes before we head into a week of rehearsals for the middle school musical. The students provided the perfect conclusion to the year in the form of their King Lear creations. I asked them to create visual representations of the storm - both physical and psychological - in King Lear. That's all I gave them in terms of parameters. I said that the success of their projects hinged on depth of thought, creativity, time, and dedication. Some of the lovely and amazing projects were handed in on Tuesday, and they were lovely. As I had promised to complete my own version of the project as well, I presented it to them on Friday, and then the rest of the class presented their creations.

When I arrived at my office in the morning, there were projects everywhere. On every surface, on my chair, on the floor, on my desk.

Storms exploding out of heads,

self-immolating crowns of purple and gold,

beautifully painted boxes depicting Lear's loss of identity and his inability to see himself clearly.

The creations were smart, creative and revealed the students' understanding of what Lear experienced out there, on the heath, as he descended into madness.

This last creation is a personal favorite of mine. The student had asked if he could present a sort of performance art piece in order to represent his take on Lear's storm. I was skeptical, but as I have written over and over again, my students never cease to surprise and amaze me. I told him I trusted his judgment, and gave him the green light for his performance. What I love most about this creation is that it required him to commit, to put himself out there and pull off a performance that could have easily fallen into frivolous silliness. Yes, we laughed, but not because the performance was funny. We laughed because we loved it, and because we loved him for his courage.

We laughed because his was the last presentation, on the last day of class, in their last year at Crossroads Academy. I laughed because this is what they will remember, after they have left our small, rural community for high schools all over New England.

Thus ends English 7 and 8 for the 2011-2012. It's been a great year.

Nothing Comes From Nothing

The rest of the students will present tomorrow, but my interpretation of the storm in King Lear is finally dry and ready to be revealed to the world:

The text on the "storm," or "mask" is from the Dramatis Personae and the scenes leading up to the storm and the storm itself. The quotes in the crown are from the scenes early on when Lear revels in his kingliness. The base includes quotes from scenes that precipitate the storm - the love challenge and so forth. The "paint" is glue and paint mixed together so it dries clear. The greenery is meant to evoke the heath (clippings from the hedges outside the front of the middle school).

To be continued tomorrow when the kids present their creations.

The King is in High Rage

I have been waiting for this day for weeks! The King Lear final projects were handed in today!

I asked the 8th graders to create a visual representation of the storm in King Lear - both the external, tangible storm, and the internal, psychological storm raging in Lear's mind. They may create whatever they want, as long as it is something they can present in class and represents the storm. Most of the projects will be presented on Friday, but five students offered to go today so we could fit all of the presentations in before I lose the kids to the middle school musical and rehearsals next week.

One girl made a copper crown to represent the storm, both interior and exterior. She dyed three different colors of gray to represent the three different meaning of madness - insane, angry, and "marked by intense and chaotic activity." There are two rings, or crowns; the outer ring is Nature ruling over all, and the inner ring is Lear's Kingly crown. The copper crown is punched full holes to represent the unsubstantial nature of his rule, and the myriad aspects of existence that his crown is lacking. The screws holding the two crowns together represent the connection between Nature and mankind. To see the inner storm you must look through the outer storm. If you are wearing it, you must peer through Lear's inner storm to see the outer storm. In her own description of the project, she said:

 

Another girl created King Lear's head. The exterior:

And the interior. The storm that rages inside his head has a soundtrack, music she created by synthesizing the sounds of a storm and various overlays of music. You wear the headphones while wearing the head. It's quite trippy in there. See photo at the end of this post for my experience of this particular project. 

One boy's project was a piñata. The exterior is Lear, of course, and when he beat the head open with a stick, destroying it, bags of Tootsie Rolls fell out. Each bag was tied with a ribbon and a piece of paper listing the elements that precipitated (pun intended) the storm.

Another girl's project was a box with a glittering "Unnatural" world above, adorned with the ornaments of Lear's reign as King - gold, jewels - and the "Natural" world below. When the box was placed on the edge of a table, Lear's crown totters, on the very edge of falling into the state of the Natural world. The quotes on the crown are from the storm scene. One refers to the external storm, and the other describes the internal tempest in King Lear's mind.

Finally, a girl made a mobile of the storm with Lear's thought in the center: "I am a man more sinned against than sinning." She's going to let me keep this one, and I will hang it proudly from the ceiling of my classroom.

It was a lovely day, even as a real storm brews in our neck of the woods. Tornado watch, hail, and severe thunderstorms are predicted for this afternoon and evening. Unfortunately, I have to be back here tonight for the 7th grade performances of Twelfth Night, so I am feeling a little, well, insane. Clearly, art imitates life.

Halcyon Days

After more than a decade of teaching, I still find it fascinating that the best and the worst days can be one in the same. 


Today was so...odd, and horrifying, and lovely, and frustrating, and invigorating. In other words, today was a normal day in middle school. 


Vocabulary word of the day: Halcyon. 


As usual, there's a story behind the word of the day. Once upon a time, Aeolus, the King of the winds, had a daughter, Alcyone. Alcyone was one of the Pleiades, married to Ceyx, the King of Thessaly. When Ceyx drowned (thanks to a thunderbolt from Zeus), Alcyone, overcome with grief for her husband, threw herself into the sea. Instead of drowning, she was carried on the winds, in the form of a bird, usually identified as a Kingfisher. In legend, the Kingfisher builds its nests on the open ocean, so Aeolus decreed that there would be a time of calm while the eggs of the Kingfisher are in the nest, waiting to hatch out the vulnerable offspring. Consequently, the fourteen days surrounding the winter solstice, the days in which the Kingfisher hatches her eggs on magically calm open seas, are termed the "halcyon days."


The Kingfisher, or the bird alkyon or halkyon, from the Greek hals "sea, salt" and kyon "conceive, to swell" is allowed to brood her eggs on a sea of calm thanks to her father Aeolus. Appropriately, there's a genus of the Kingfisher family called Ceyx, and another called Halcyonidae. 


Ovid wrote: 


The Gods their chapes to winter-birds translate,

But both obnoxious to their former fate.
Their conjugaal affection still it tied,
And still the mournful race is multiplied:
They bill, they tread; Alcyone compressed, 
Seven days sits brooding on her floating nest:
A wintry queen: her sire at length is kind,
Calms ev'ry storm and hushes ev'ry wind;
Prepares his empire for his daughter's ease,
And for his hatching nephews smooths the seas.


Today was not a halcyon day. Today, there was no calm, there was no hush. Today was chaos. My boss was away at a conference, and I taught six classes in a day of seven periods. Today, there were disciplinary actions, "talks" with students, and at one desperate moment, a nap on my office floor seemed the only reasonable option.


But it's April in New Hampshire, and I am used to unsettled weather. Today, for example, Lyme had bright sunshine, torrential downpours, hail, and high winds. On such a day, my scheduled lesson, the short stories of a few despairing Russians, was not working for my eighth graders. Dostoyevsky's An Honest Thief, Chekov's The Bet, and Tolstoy's God Sees the Truth But Waits was not going to happen. The stories - and my entire short story unit, no less - may have been inked into the schedule since September, but that does not mean I could force the Russians down my students' throats. They needed a change in the weather.


I happened to have a stack of King Lear, ordered for next year's class. I hadn't planned to use them, but they were sitting right there, on my office floor, taking up my nap space. I figured it if it is my favorite story, I could make it their favorite story. At least until May. 


And so far, so good. They needed a change, so I switched up my plans. They needed energy, so I will give them all I've got. No reading from seats; all reading will be done from the front of the room. No homework in Lear; all reading will be done in class. Performances and enthusiasm, not innate comprehension, will be graded. The play's the thing.


We started reading, and the skies cleared over my classroom. The howling winds died down and I heard laughter instead. The boy who read Cordelia's part today day gave his all. The girl who stood tall, delivering Lear's words as he struggled to reclaim his dignity in the aftermath of his disastrous love test earned a ten out of ten for her efforts.


Where boredom dominated, enthusiasm now reigns. 


And that's how middle school works. The winds may rage, but inside the walls of our middle school, I provide the calm waters my students need in order to emerge from their nests unscathed. Because sometimes, when they are at their most chaotic, they require my stability, my quiet, the solace of my classroom. Today, I had to shield them from the hail and high winds and create artificial halcyon days. Like Aeolus, I will provide it, but I will also retain my parents' prerogative to be frustrated and exhausted from the exertion that this protection demands.


Today, I played the benevolent Prospero. Today, I conjured some magic, changed the weather, and calmed the seas under their nests. Tomorrow, who knows. 


Tonight, the evening is suffused with that golden light that peers out from a clearing in dark, stormy skies. The dark and rain will return, but for a little while, it's what Walt Whitman saw when he envisioned his "Halcyon Days."


As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky, 
As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, balmier air, 
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs
really finish'd and indolent-ripe on the tree, 
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!

Trespass Freely and Fearlessly

William Dyce, King Lear and the Fool in the Storm (1851)

A teacher who has been following along at the Core Knowledge blog emailed me a while back with a great question. I've been meaning to answer and there's no better time than today, when I have five other deadlines to avoid.

Dear Jess, 


Here's my question for today: how much can high school age students benefit from a classical curriculum like the one at my kids' school?

I love that next year my son will read, for example, Plato, as part of the Great Books type humanities program. That stuff is challenging for even the best educated adults. We chose to transfer our kids this year to [name deleted] specifically because of their humanities program. The other option was having them take many AP courses while attending the nearby traditional public high school. I had nothing like the [name deleted] curriculum back in my high school days, and I only read Great Books stuff on my own, many years after I graduated from college.  So I'm excited for my kids to have this opportunity, but only if it benefits them.

Are "Great Books" relevant for today's students? 

My answer is an emphatic yes, and I whip out my favorite quote on the subject, by Michael Dirda: "Classics are classics not because they are educational, but because people have found them worth reading, generation after generation, century after century."

The argument against asking young people to read great books goes something like this discussion from the Diane Rehm Show. Panelists were discussing the novel Ethan Frome, and a caller said he thought students should not read some books until they are forty, with the life experience and perpective to understand the darker, more mature themes. 

While I would shy away from teaching Ethan Frome in the darkest weeks of our New Hampshire winter - just for sanity's sake, mind you - I respectfully disagree. I have heard this argument among teachers, that Romeo and Juliet is appropriate for middle school, while King Lear is not. Romeo and Juliet concerns itself with the heartache of young love, while King Lear stares down the naked torment Lear finds at the end of his useful life. Students may find connections to their own life in the story of Romeo and Juliet's love tragedy, but the pain of losing a child and the treachery of the vile Edmund are just too mature for younger readers. 

Sure, the familiar may be strange in King Lear, but there is much to offer young people in a story such as Lear's. My students love the treachery of Edmund, the way he plots against the seemingly perfect and legitimate Edgar. Lovely, bookish, kind, Edgar, who can do no wrong in his father's eyes. And the wish-fulfillment factor runs high as Edmund is overtaken by sibling rivalry and plots to steal a place in his father's heart - or at least his inheritance.

Or what of Cordelia? The youngest child, who cannot heave her heart into her mouth in order to satisfy her father's outlandish expectations and is eclipsed by her more aggressive older sisters? Or Gloucester, who does not realize until too late that he has hurt someone he loves, and must find a way to make amends.  

No, King Lear is not an easy read. It would be much easier for me to reach for The Hunger Games or Inkheart - both commonly assigned in middle school, and books with entertaining plots, to be sure, but lacking in the complexity that makes a great book great. The questions are simply too easy in those books. “Of all the virtues related to intellectual functioning, the most passive is the virtue of knowing the right answer. Knowing the right answer requires no decisions, carries no risks, and makes no demands,” writes Elanor Duckworth in The Having of Wonderful Ideas.

It is important that we ask students to read great works of literature because, when we hand them Dickens or Shakespeare, we offer students so much more than a good story. We give them the opportunity to step beyond the safe boundary of the known world and journey into the uncharted territory of challenging vocabulary, unpredictable plot, and shifting perspectives. I'm with Virginia Woolf on this one, "Literature is no one's private ground. Literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves."

In the end, that's what I hope I do. I teach my students how to find their own way through a complex and challenging world, and these books are the maps I hand my students.

Great books are literary proving grounds, safe places for students to try, fail, and in the end, find unexpected moments of wonder and pride in their own abilities. Students cannot approach these works lightly; they must brave these works armed with their own experiences and ability to reason, because great works of literature require more than simple retrieval and regurgitation of other’s ideas; they demand feats of intellectual bravery, patience, and trust.

Great books contain more than challenging vocabulary and syntax. Great books contain novel ideas, universal themes, vivid sensory experiences and complex literary construction absent from commonplace works of literature. Great books teach great lessons. When students learn to ask more of the books they read, they learn to ask more of themselves.

Fine Word - 'Legitimate'

I love words. I love that words have history, and ancestors, and family trees. I love that geography, culture, economics, and historical events give birth to words and shape their evolution over time.

I never wanted to be a Latin teacher, but I suppose it was inevitable. After I accepted my current job as an English and Latin teacher, my aunt revealed that my grandmother had wanted to be a Latin teacher more than anything in the world, but she could not, due to marriage, family obligations, all those things that kept women of that era from being able to fulfill their dreams. She became the first female (and, as I understand from my family, the youngest) court stenographer for the Indiana Supreme Court. Her father had to go to work with her, she was so young. She deserved to do whatever she wanted to do. And so it's fitting - and more than an honor - to fulfill her posthumous dream. It's in my blood, I suppose. 

I find it fascinating that denied the opportunity to teach others about her love of words, she spent her entire career recording spoken English, condensing its sounds into squiggles and lines. She used to hone her shorthand skills by transcribing entire soap opera episodes and telephone conversations on. Ask her what my father ate for lunch during a mid-day phone call in 1972, and she could have flipped right to the combination of squiggles for “soup, a pickle, and a Heineken.”

I like to think she would have enjoyed my classes; particularly the time I spent on etymology, the study of word origins. I teach one vocabulary/etymology word a day at the very beginning of class when I teach my cultural literacy item of the day. Today's word? Spurious. A great word, one that my grandmother would have loved.

‘Spurious’ describes something that is false, or inauthentic, but it comes from the Latin spurius, meaning “bastard” or “illegitimate.” Spurius was related to all sorts of lovely words such as spurcitia, meaning “filthiness” or “dirt,” and spurcare, “to make dirty” or “to defile.” The Romans thought highly of their illegitimate children, clearly. They even turned spurius into a proper name for all those illegitimate offspring roaming around ancient Rome. If your name was Spurius, you were likely illegitimate.

Which segues nicely into my cultural literacy item of the day. I got to thinking: If the Roman naming convention had continued into the Elizabethan era, and Shakespeare had known about it, and he'd named Gloucester's illegitimate son Spurius instead of Edmund, the first speech in Act II of King Lear would be even more awesome than it already is.

Edmund (a.k.a Spurius) was the illegitimate son of Gloucester, close advisor to Lear. Gloucester lavishes all of his love on the legitimate son, Edgar, which drives Edmund nuts. He hates being a bastard because it renders him less than - more base - than his bookish brother Edgar. Anger drives him to deceit in the form of a tragic plot against his brother that leads to Oedipus-style eye removal, nakedness, and rampant baseness among all concerned. The fact that Edmund is, in fact, the spurious (illegitimate) son causes him to become spurious (false) and deceive his father. See that? That's just lovely, if you ask me.

I recommend this PBS performance of King Lear, as the Edmund is a hottie and does this extremely appealing L- and T- thing with his tongue on the word "legitimate" that causes giggles among the middle school girls. Oh, not me. I would never. Not in English class, anyway.

Act I, Scene 2

The Earl of Gloucester's castle

Enter [Edmund, the bastard] alone, with a letter [the one he's going to use to trick his father, Gloucester, into disavowing his good and true son, Edgar]

Edmund (Spurius, the bad-boy hottie I mentioned)

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law

My services are bound. Wherefore should I                       335

Stand in the plague of custom, and permit

The curiosity of nations to deprive me,

For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines

Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?

When my dimensions are as well compact,                        340

My mind as generous, and my shape as true,

As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us

With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?

Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take

More composition and fierce quality                                  345

Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,

Go to th' creating a whole tribe of fops

Got 'tween asleep and wake? Well then,

Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.

Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund                         350

As to th' legitimate. Fine word- 'legitimate'!

Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,

And my invention thrive, Edmund the base

Shall top th' legitimate. I grow; I prosper.

Now, gods, stand up for bastards!                                       355

The girls may adore the hunky, bad-boy Edmund, but despite my dorky enthusiasm for the nickname, they absolutely refuse to call him Spurius. My love for the symmetry of it all was loudly and eagerly trumped by the fact that 'Edmund' sounds a lot like 'Edward,' the vapid vampire guy from Twilight - or, as I like to call it, "That book I won't give you independent reading credit for, so don't even bother to ask me."

Did I mention that my preferred word for the time of day between daylight and nighttime is not, in fact 'twilight,' but gloaming, from the Old English glomung, a derivative of glom, from...aw, crap. Crappity-crap-crap.

From glom, Old English for 'twilight.'