"As a student teacher, I was fortunate to work with a cooperating teacher who said, 'I want someone to love the kids as much as I do.' I was inspired by that and worked at lesson planning to show my 'love.'"
"In retrospect, it was a love for teaching writing and Shakespeare, and it was this kind of love that kept me going for a few years. However, what I loved changed when I began working with inspiring, bright, and often selfless teens; I loved the 'good' kids. Now in my 16th year of teaching, I realize love isn’t a feeling; it’s an act of the will, a conscious choice I make no matter what students do. AP Amy may challenge my grading or Sophomore Sam may say, 'This is stupid' every day, but I love them. In loving my challenging students, I have found the sweetest successes."
--Tracy Fisher Bouslog, Parkway South High School, Manchester, Missouri
10 years teaching
Related NCTE Resources...
Unlocking Shakespeare's Language: Help for the Teacher and Student With the activities in this book by Randal Robinson, your students can come to understand the language of Shakespeare by learning to recognize and translate troublesome words and syntactic patterns. The activities involve rearranging words in lines of Shakespeare to a more familiar subject-verb-object, or complement, sequence; rearranging lines to reproduce Shakespearean rhymes and iambic pentameter; imitating Shakespeare using modern sentences; and other detailed work with words.
Performance Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare
Edward L. Rocklin offers teachers a wide array of concepts and practices to explore with their students specific performances as well as the performance potentials of a Shakespeare text. Examining drama as both text and performance opens up a range of actions that inexperienced readers can miss when they are limited to reading words on the page.
"Shakespeare for a New Age" is the theme for this September 2002 English Journal issue.
ReadWriteThink Lesson Plans