Favourite lessons – Soliloquy buster

I found it somewhere online. I wish I could remember where or when, but all I know now is that I discovered the bones of one of my favourite lessons sometime before I started assiduously attributing everything I found – partly to model for my students, but mostly so I could find it again. My original is saved as a .docx – so this is from after 2007 but before the school board went Google. Suffice it to say, there’s nothing particularly new here.

Old as it is, this lesson sat in my files for years before I suddenly started using it. A few years ago, post-Covid, my complicated on-again-off-again relationship with Hamlet was, well, on again – and this time I knew that the dense language of the soliloquies was going to be problematic. I already had students acting out a dumb-show of sorts as we started the play, and we pretty much always play a few rounds of “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” before we get very far into Act 1. We also stomp around the room learning the feeling of iambic pentameter by chanting “I am a pirate with a wooden leg.” But none of those things were going to get us through the “solid flesh” soliloquy in Act 1, scene 2 (which starts with trochaic meter, of all things – clearly Shakespeare was NOT thinking of future students). What to do? What to do?

Get on our feet, obviously.

After making sure we understand what’s led up to Hamlet being alone on stage for the first time, I hand out the soliloquy and the class makes a circle. I don’t bother explaining any of the words or references – I just say that I expect people to struggle with some of the pronunciation. Then we read the soliloquy around the circle, switching at every punctuation mark. No one understands much. I ask if any words or ideas jumped out at them. Usually there’s something but mostly everyone is lost.

Then we read around the circle again – this time just the last word of every line. Sometimes we do this twice. Again, I ask what this might be about. Now people are starting to get some ideas. I answer some questions: Hyperion is the Titan who ruled the sun; a satyr is a, um, horny goat man; Niobe wept until she turned into a weeping statue…

Depending on how much time we have, we may read around the circle again – either switching at punctuation or switching at end of sentences. Today, I was running a bit behind, so I just harried everyone outside into the cool autumn air. Then I explained what we were doing. We all read the soliloquy out loud. The deal is, though, that as you read, you walk in a straight line and turn 180 degrees every time there’s a punctuation mark.

There are a lot of punctuation marks. A LOT.

Soon, everyone is reading and walking and turning and turning. It is confusing. We lose our place. We’re not in time with everyone else. Basically, it’s chaos. When we finish, I ask “How is Hamlet feeling?” And everyone knows.
Confused.
Anxious.
Messed up.
He’s just turning in circles, like he doesn’t know what to do.

Back inside, we read the soliloquy one more time – this time as a conversation between two halves of the class. The “speaker” switches at every punctuation mark again – as if Hamlet is talking to himself which, of course, he is.

And then the bell rings. As students leave they tell me what they know. He’s angry – at his mother, for getting married again, for getting married so fast, for marrying Claudius. His world is a mess. He’s just so upset. It’s like, how did I end up here?

Which is, of course, exactly how Hamlet feels in this soliloquy. Tomorrow we’ll look at some of the words and phrases, but the real work is already done – and the students did it themselves, with their bodies and the words on the page. Because it’s all right there.

Now, for the rest of the play.

(This page has lots of good information and links to a video where actor Paapa Essiedu demonstrates some of this methodology.)

Bye-Bye Wi-fi

This morning we got an email from the Board Office telling us that yesterday’s wifi issues had been resolved. Yesterday’s wifi issues were, in fact, minimal. Today’s issues, on the other hand, were dramatic: the internet was out all afternoon. We did not get an email about this. Many teachers threw up their hands; some lessons are impossible to teach without the materials you prepared. I had made it to the photocopier in the morning, so my classes proceeded more or less as planned.

If you work in a school for long enough, or even for not very long at all, at some point the wifi will go out. If you are not a teacher, you might imagine that the worst timing for this would be in the middle of a lesson, but in fact the worst timing is any moment before you have photocopied the day’s handouts. And these days, the photocopier will inevitably require an internet connection to function, so if the wifi is down, no photocopies for you. Luckily, even in the age of Chromebooks and Google Classrooms, if you have handouts, friends, you have a lesson.

I am old enough that I started teaching – wait for this – BEFORE the internet was part of school. Heck, I am pretty sure the first school I worked at was still using dot matrix printers. I used to stand in front of a classroom with *chalk* and pre-planned examples. Students had to write down what I wrote on the board. If they were absent, they had to ask friends for notes. Even contemplating this now is vaguely mind-boggling.

All of this made me think of my interview for a job at the Lycee International just outside of Paris. I was traveling in France with a school group when I got the call offering me an interview. I was brimming with excitement. They wanted me to come for a day, meet with people and teach a few lessons. They were willing to fly me to Paris for this. I told them I was currently in the country and offered to come for a half day and do the interview while I was there – saving them some money and me the complicated travel during the school year. They said yes.

When I agreed to teach a few classes, I hadn’t really considered that I had no resources with me – just the novels I was reading for pleasure. This was the mid-90s, so the internet existed, but it was nothing like what we have today; it was slow and housed significantly fewer resources. Plus, the school group I was with were doing homestays, so I was staying in the home of an older couple whose dial-up connection barely gave me access to my email. What to do? What to do?

What I did was taught what I knew. It was mid-February, so I dreamed up a lesson on Shakespearean sonnets and love poetry for the 11th grade class. I knew the sonnet form and knew enough of a few sonnets to be certain I could manage it. Read, think, write, share. Got it. Then, for the 8th grade class, I decided to go with James Thurber. You can’t miss with Thurber; if nothing else you can always spend time making noises – ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa – or laughing about unicorns. I knew I could turn these ideas into lessons – even for students I’d never met, even in France – without too much trouble.

Once I arrived at the school, I asked if I could use their internet to download and print the poems and the story. The Director looked at me, incredulous. “You planned your lessons in your head?” I shrugged. It was all I had available.

Luckily, the internet was working that day, so the staff gamely printed and photocopied the texts. My lessons went well – love and funny noises really never fail – and I got the job.

Today, I handed out This I Believe essays I had copied before the wifi died and dug through my teacher’s closet until I found books that I had long ago annotated in the way that I wanted the students to understand. If anything, pulling my own books with my own handwriting out of a closet in the classroom showed the students that I actually believe in annotating things. They sat with highlighters and pencils, reading texts on paper and noticing how they were constructed. It was kind of great.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll pull out some Thurber, just to see if it stands the test of time. Only, of course, if the wifi is working.

First impressions

Ten instructional days down, 179 to go. Here are some images so far:

The child who came into our Reading class after doing a phonics screen, put their head down and cried. They can “read” but only words they already know. When I went to comfort them, saying, “This is not your fault; this is the fault of the school system,” they whispered back, “Please don’t kick me out. This is the only class where I can breathe.”

A grade 12 class with 32 students, so full that I don’t have actual desk space for everyone. They just pile in and draw chairs up to the edges of tables. So far, it’s mostly working, though the room gets hot (and a little stinky).

The astonished look on a student’s face when I insisted, “really, you can read whatever you want for the first 15 minutes of class. The goal is to enjoy reading.” He chose a Russian novel!

When I told the Reading Class yesterday that I thought maybe they weren’t interested in watching the news (CNN10) at the beginning of class each day. (Our goal is to provide them with background information and a place to talk about big ideas.) Several of them looked up, shocked. “But we LIKE the news.” I said that I was worried they were a little bored by it this year. “No, Miss, that’s just how we look regularly. We still want to watch.” So we are.

The first student who finished a book – last week!! She handed back A Good Girls’ Guide to Murder and showed me that she had already checked out the second one from the library since she didn’t think I had it. Later, when her friend teased that she read all the time because she “doesn’t have a life,” she just smiled and said, “Miss, do you know where that book is? X needs to read it.” And… we already have a book making the rounds based on recommendations.

A student from my first year at this school – now in his final year of university – who has come back to volunteer in the classroom one day a week because he thinks he might want to be a teacher. On his first day in the classroom, he sat down next to a student and listened to them read aloud – just like I did with him five years ago. He even found a book he read that semester, still on my shelf.

When I looked up today and realized that 22 grade 9 students were paired up and having a focused conversation as they prepared to conduct interviews later this week. The class was abuzz with the sound of their voices talking about books they like and objects that hold meaning for them.

The three students who have been coming in almost every day during my prep period to tidy up my room. It is, in fact, a mess. They bubble with energy as they put up the bulletin boards I can only dream of and organize books so that the shelving system makes sense. They chat and straighten and tell me that I need to get rid of books no one is reading. “So many books, Miss!” and they shake their heads at me.

The student from last year who came in today at lunch and asked to borrow a book so that she could read it in her class this year. She had some general ideas about books she might like, but she wondered if maybe I could recommend something. No surprise to anyone, I could.

The repeated refrain, “You had my sister… do you remember my brother… you taught my cousin” followed by “she says hello”. The images of former students swim into my head – where they sat, what they read – and I smile when I say, “Tell her I say hello, too.”

Learning to read, again and again

I haven’t written here all summer (wow!), but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about reading and writing. In fact, quite the opposite is true. During a summer of learning and thinking about how to help students who are not yet reading at their grade level or chronological age, I found myself remembering some of my own stabs at emergent literacy. No, no, not from when I was a child. That’s important, I suppose, but I learned to read in a relatively straightforward way, so my journey doesn’t shed much light on adolescent learners. Instead, I keep thinking about the times I’ve had to learn to read again as an adult.

Anyone who’s learning about reading is going to come across Scarborough’s Reading Rope at some point or another. Here, I’ll show you the image:

It’s not particularly complicated (in fact, this is called the “simple view of reading”), but it’s a useful way to break down what goes into the complex task of learning to read.

My first attempt at learning to read again was when I moved to Bulgaria in the 1990s (“You’re from the 1900s, Miss!”). There, long before the internet was ubiquitous, I approached an entirely new alphabet and language armed only with a physical book hopefully entitled “Teach Yourself Bulgarian.” It was, shockingly, the only copy at the bookstore when I went in to buy it. Amazon did not yet exist.

On the trip to Sofia, I pored over the Cyrillic alphabet. Some of it overlapped with my familiar Latin alphabet – easy; some of it used familiar shapes for different sounds – harder; some of it was completely new to me – hmmm…. In my airplane seat I made sounds under my breath, testing myself by covering the pronunciation guide with my hand.

Days later, I wandered through downtown Dimitrovgrad (Димитровград) forcing myself to pause and sound out the words on signs. It was disheartening until I got to I discovered ресторант – restaurant! Yes! Minutes later I encountered a store window that said аптекар – ah…p…t…eh..kah…er – aptekar – apothecary – this was the drug store! A glance in the window confirmed my elementary decoding. I was right! I could read Bulgarian! This year overseas was going to be a snap! I could already read! I was exultant.

Friends, decoding is not reading. If only I’d known then what I know now – if only I’d known about the interplay between vocabulary knowledge (I already knew what restaurant meant), background knowledge (which moved me from apothecary to drug store), and decoding, I might not have been so disappointed when I looked at what was clearly a bookstore and read книжарница. It was more than my poor language-loving heart could take. I went back to my apartment for the day.

While I never learned to read or speak Bulgarian fluently, I did learn enough to handle daily life. I could find markets and grocery stores, order a coffee or a simple meal. I could get on the train and have a basic conversation with the people in my compartment. I learned how to tell people that I was a teacher and I found Bulgaria beautiful. My reading, like my speaking, remained halting. Even once I could decode quickly, I often couldn’t understand what I was reading. It was…. hard.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot this summer, about what it was like to live in a country where I had to pause to read the signs, pause to make meaning of what others took for granted. I mostly frequented familiar places. In the markets, I went to the vendors who I knew would be patient with me; in restaurants I ordered what I could understand, rarely veering into the unknown. It was a comfortable way to live, but over time I think I would have felt hemmed in.

In a week, when students are back in school, when I’m meeting young people who are hiding their reading difficulties (even though they will be in Reading class, so it’s not like I won’t know), these experiences will stick with me: both the comfort of sticking with the familiar and the excitement of decoding a new word. After all, by the end of my year in Bulgaria, I could easily read книжарница even if I only went in ones that stocked English language books.

Overheard

There are only a few more weeks of school, and students are forgetting to use their “inside the head” voices when I’m nearby. I suppose I’m doing the same, but as far as I can tell no one is paying attention to what I say anymore – even when they should. Here are a few recent gems from my classes:

“Honestly, I hate all the characters in Hamlet. They’re either misogynist or helpless or stupid or all three of those things.”

“Hamlet’s got lowkey aura. He was cold when he killed that old dude. Just kept on yelling at his mom.” (I may have some of the adjectives in the wrong order here.)

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are seriously bad friends.”

“How could you leave Fortinbras out? Like… the play just ends and no one is in charge of Denmark?”

“Miss, don’t tell anyone, but Senior Skip Day is next Friday.”
“Why didn’t you plan anything for Friday? Oh! Right! We forgot to tell you. We moved Skip Day because it’s going to rain.”
“Um, actually, we might move it back if the weather is good. Can you just watch the forecast?”
“You’ll be ok either way, right? Like, you obviously know how to teach, so if we come you’ll think of something – but we’ll try to tell you ahead of time.”

“How is ‘time’ not a countable noun?”

“You can count bread. What are you even talking about?”

“What do you mean you can’t count money? You can obviously count money.” (I try to explain the difference between physically counting money and money being an uncountable noun.) “This doesn’t even make any sense.”

“Wait, there are rules for less and fewer? Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?”

“Honestly, Miss, capital letters are old school. I don’t think people really use them anymore.”

“A core-what?” (I explain what a corsage is.) “I think that’s not a thing anymore.”
I ask the girls in grade 12 English. They are certain it is still a thing.
“Yeah, you have to give her a corsage, and she gives you a button ear.”

“A word with the short a sound? Um…asshole.”

“Can you stop telling my parents when I’m late or not here? I feel like I can manage my attendance on my own.”

“Why do you want me here on time so bad?

“What do you mean we have an exam?”

Unexpected knowledge

If you watch a ten-minute news show (CNN10) every morning with your high school Literacy class, at some point your students will probably surprise you with their random bits of knowledge. They might, for example, know exactly where Venezuela is even though they recently mixed up Japan and Jamaica (“They’re both islands, Miss”), or maybe they’ll share a remarkable series of facts about the Apollo 13 mission after Artemis lands safely.

Perhaps, after a spirited class discussion about hantavirus and what it might feel like to be stuck on a ship where hantavirus has killed several passengers, you will say something about how rats initially spread the disease. And maybe, just maybe, a student will perk up in the back corner of the classroom and blurt out, “It could be a capybara.”

Huh?

“Hantavirus is spread by rodents, not just rats, so it could be capybaras. Capybaras are the largest rodents. They can get as big as wolves.”

If you are lucky, you will not spit out your tea as you try to suppress hilarious laughter at the vision of wolf-sized capybaras capering about the cargo hold of a cruise ship.

If you are very lucky, your student will then pause thoughtfully and add, “but it’s probably rats.”

5400 Seconds

One class period: 4500 seconds
One episode of the TV series we’re currently watching: 2820 seconds
Two episodes: 5640 seconds
Project Hail Mary film: 9360 seconds
Time my child spent on his phone, average, per day, during March Break: 38,040 seconds
Time it took me to read President Trump’s post threatening to destroy Iran: approximately 18 seconds

Time remaining when Trump called off his plan to obliterate Iran: 5400 seconds

What would you do if you had 5400 seconds to live?
Hug your children? Read a book?
Cook dinner? Cry?
Send a text? Doomscroll on TikTok?
Check to see if the crocus on the corner in the shade had bloomed yet?
Look at the moon and think of the astronauts?
Try to sleep? Maybe melatonin would help?
Hold your lover? Stroke their body one last time?
Take a bath? Use the fancy soap?

Write to your Congressperson?
Wish you had voted? Or hadn’t voted?
Demonstrate? Protest?

Go to your church – or synagogue – or mosque?
Pray?

“A whole civilization* will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
*93 million people

For reference:
Canada’s population: 41.5 million
Mexico’s population: 132 million
Venezuela’s population: ≅30 million
Cuba’s population: ≅10 million

Today, a madman threatened to murder 93 million people because of where they live.

He is still in power.

Kindness #SOLC26 31/31

I’ve written about my “chaos class” several times this month. First, when faced with my exasperated declaration, “fine, you choose what we study!” they shocked me by choosing Romeo & Juliet. Then, there were several incidents of bullying which led to me giving them a very serious dressing down. Then we had March Break (and let me tell you, we needed it).

When we returned from break, I knew I had to have my “strict teacher” persona firmly at the fore for a little while so that the students didn’t think their appalling pre-break behaviour was acceptable. I hate the strict teacher persona and find it exhausting, but I did it: I made sure every cell phone was in a backpack, every notebook on a notebook, every tardy explained or excused. The strictness was necessary, but it wasn’t going to be enough. “Strict teacher” gets compliance, but a truly effective class has more; we needed engagement. (I mean, if I am 100% honest, then yes, with this class at least a little compliance would be nice because the class needs to function, but I also hope that they will be engaged.) Engagement, however, requires some vulnerability, which means being able to trust that we won’t be mocked, which in turn means it’s hard to learn in a room with even one bully – and we have more than one.

My being strict might stop the bullying I could see, but it wasn’t going to change anything once my back was turned. I needed more. I needed kindness – not mine: theirs.

****

When we were little, no matter how often we fought, the punishment that united my sisters and me against our parents was “ten nice things.” All three of us hated it. It was the worst. It went like this: if we were really really awful to one another – especially in the car – then our mother would stop everything and make us say ten nice things to one another. Ten! TEN! Worse, after three or four rounds of “I like your hair. I like your shoes” she would tell us it couldn’t be anything physical, which left us having to say at least six things we actually liked about the other person. It was awful. And it worked every time: by the end, we would be super mad at our mother and kind of ok with our sister. My mother was not dumb.

****

When I was teaching at a very small school in Washington DC, the Dean of Faculty once split us into groups of four or five teachers and gave each group an enormous stack of sticky notes. One teacher sat in the centre while others wrote compliments on the sticky notes for a few minutes. Then, we read the sticky notes out loud and stuck them onto the teacher in the centre of the group. It was awkward and a little cheesy, and listening to our colleagues compliment us made each one of us a little emotional. I saved my sticky notes for years; I know others did the same.

****

Punishment? Compliments? I wanted my students to dig deep and find something nice to say about each of their peers – and I wanted each person in the classroom to feel valued. I needed them to practice kindness until they felt it.

I got out the sticky notes. On Day 1, I put five names on the board. Everyone had to write nice things on the stickies. I wrote, too. The notes could be anonymous, but I reviewed every note as it was handed to me. One student wrote “You have a nice smile” five times. I told them to start over. One student wrote “You are nice.” I asked for specificity. One student wrote “You are perfect in class” – an obvious lie – I told them that lying was as unkind as writing something mean because “it shows you can’t be bothered to think of something true.” Eventually, everyone finished. I gave the stacks of kind words to the five students as the rest of us began to work. Each student read through their notes. One girl, well liked and clever, whispered to me “this feels really good” and then slipped the post-its quietly into her purse. One boy read only a few of his, then immediately tucked them away. After class, I saw him in the hallway, alone, reading through the notes.

On Day 2, both the bullied and the bully’s names were on the board. I did not require the bullied student to write to the bully, but I did require the bully to write to everyone. I read every note, paying particular attention to those going to the bullied student. I returned a few for improvements, but I was impressed by how many students wrote truly kind and thoughtful notes to their ostracized peer; he wasn’t as alone as I had feared. Again I handed out the stack of post-its as we started an activity. Once most students were working, I glanced around at the students who had received the notes. The student on the receiving end of the bullying was furtively wiping tears from his eyes. I made my way over to him to ask if he was ok. “No one has ever said anything this nice to me before,” he whispered. He spent much of the rest of class arranging and rearranging the notes in his notebook.

We’ll be done with this activity tomorrow. By then, everyone will have received a stack of kindness from their peers. I was feeling so good about this that I let down my guard a little today, and immediately phones came out and people talked so much during the balcony scene that I had to pause the video. They’re still the same kids. Still, I hope that some of them are just a little kinder than they were two weeks ago.

And hey, if they start picking on each other again, I might just channel my mother: after all, my sisters and I had to say ten nice things to each other far more than once before it really stuck – and now we’re good friends.

PS – I saved this one for the last day of March not only because it’s ongoing but also because every year this month of writing challenges me to look closely and seek good things to share; and every year the kindness of others’ posts and comments buoys me. Community and kindness are hallmarks of this March challenge – now in my classroom, too.

Vocabulary #SOLC26 30/31

A “graduated” from our reading class last semester after our screeners consistently showed that he was now reading at least at a grade 7 level – probably closer to grade 8. Given that he is in grade 9 and that he had been placed in our reading class because he wasn’t reading well, this was good news.

One of his favourite things in class was watching and discussing the daily news. Each class started with CNN10, and each day he took a contrarian point of view and challenged our thinking. He loved being pushed to think beyond his own perspective, and he loved learning new “fancy” vocabulary words.

This is why I had to smile when he saw me in the hallway last week – the first time in over a month – and immediately said, “I still remember the words!”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like consensus,” he began, even as the crowd of students pulled us towards our separate destinations, “and proximity and… and…” He was still thinking, still searching for words he learned months ago, “… and brazen!” he shouted triumphantly. “BYE, MISS!”

“BYE!” I shouted back, even though it’s not very teacherly. And I smiled as I walked into the classroom to start the next class. Sometimes students really do remember what we teach. Sometimes they do.

Community Curriculum Building #SOLC26 29/31

My mind keeps going back to Sherri’s post from earlier this month. In it, she quotes abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba who says, “Knowing who to be mad at truly is praxis.” Sherri follows this quote with a number of questions we might consider when we think about our anger. In my comment I suggested that I should put them on a poster and have them next to my desk.

After venting my spleen yesterday about the frustrations of teaching with no textbooks and little content guidance, I started thinking about Kaba’s statement again: who should I be mad at truly? Whether or not I should be mad at them, I realized that I’ve been targeting my anger at “the system” or, more to the point, “the government” and then joining in the chorus of cries about intentionally underfunding education.

And look, probably “the government” should be providing more money and guidance here, but Jessica’s comment on my post reminded me that the opposite of no guidance can be far too much guidance. Very few teachers appreciate mandated programs – and sometimes these programs can be harmful (think of the mandated programs that did not use research-based ideas for teaching reading; think of the mandated programs now that only use part of the research). Glenda reminded me that even lists of suggested titles can function to place some ideologies over others. While I know these things, it was good to be reminded again that the solution to these problems is not easy. Lisa reminded me that this isn’t just happening in one place or at one school level.

I thought about these things on the way to the gym and, later, while I planned this week’s classes. My brain circled back to this as I texted my student teacher and then walked the dog. Eventually, I went back to Sherri’s post to re-read the questions she had posed as she thought about Kaba.

What is this about?
What’s at stake?
Who is involved and impacted? In which ways?
How am I contributing to this issue?
What is my role?
Who is harmed? By whom?

My brain noodled away over dinner. My ah-ha moment came when I realized that every time I’ve written about school this month, people have commented on the strength of our school community. They’re right: we have a great community. I also deeply value community, and one of my goals as a teacher is helping students feel confident about participating in society to the extent that they choose. These questions ask me to use my anger and frustration not to pull away from others, but to be in relationship with them.

Community, at its best, builds. I am contributing to the issue right now by pretending that I have no agency. And, while I cannot allocate more funds to education or create a curriculum coordinator position at the school board, I can still change my contribution to the issue. So… once March is over, my next challenge will be to reach out to English Dept Heads at high schools in my board and begin a spreadsheet that shows what we are currently teaching at various grade levels. I will ask if others want to coordinate to create a sort of internal what/ when/ why of texts we teach. I can share my criteria for choosing texts and see what others use. We can pool our knowledge to create flexible lists of texts that respond to students from all of our schools. I can use my frustration to make change. And if we, the teachers, create this content, we might be able to create something that is both useful and flexible.

The worst that happens is that it doesn’t work. The best that happens is that community – this writing community, the community of friends and colleagues who commented on my post, the community of teachers around me – creates something that serves students more effectively and helps teachers feel empowered and less alone. There is potential power in this; I’m pretty excited.