Counting down to showtime

Yesterday’s paper included a banner ad at the bottom advertising our play!  That was fun to see and very generous of Dobb’s Furniture to donate the space to us.   We also added some makeup to some of the characters for last night’s show – Scrooge and Marley and Topper – and played with lighting some.  We’ll also be able to have some boom microphones set up on the stage that will help us deal with some of the volume issues we’ve been having too with the kids voices being too low.  Its just so good to see things coming together.  The show is going to be fantastic; just still scary to be this close and still have so much left to do.  Less than 34 hours from right now till showtime!

We were supposed to do a dress rehearsal yesterday, but there was so much to figure out that it wasn’t really a dress rehearsal at all.  It did feel like we accomplished a lot, but we are still not ready for Friday night at all.  We’re meeting tonight until 4:30; it would be longer but there is a guitar and choir concert tonight that is already using the stage.  Then the kids will be meeting tomorrow after school and we’ll do a run-through or two before the actual performance.  I’ve offered to buy pizza for the kids so they don’t need to go home for dinner.  Things are coming together and getting exciting, but this is also a very nervous time.  And busy.  Late nights and lots of work.

 

Play Donations

The play project has been extremely fortunate this season to have received now over a thousand dollars in donations which alone will cover our costs for putting on the play; last night the Wal-Mart in Parker donated seven hundred dollars to us.  That means that the proceeds from ticket sales can be invested into the theater and the stage, meaning that we know we’ll now be able to have another production because of this.  This is wonderful and exciting news for the future of our theater program here at the middle school.  The play now is officially a financial success thanks to such generosity, and we have three more days no to make sure that the play too is a theatrical success!  Lots  more work to do!

 

Crunch Time

The play draws close.  Tomorrow night is our official dress rehearsal and we are a million miles from being ready.  I’m worried about lagging ticket sales, though corporate sponsorships are going well.  I’m worried about the kids volume and whether people will be able to hear or not.  I’m worried about things not being organized behind stage.  I’m worried about whether or not the music and the play will fit together right.  So many things to worry about, so little time left to worry about them.

I spent about two hours after play practice passing out posters for the play to local businesses.  It feels like things are coming together, but far too slowly.  We have a set now, but it hasn’t been painted yet, but we have a grandpa of one of our actresses how has generously volunteered his time this week to work on it.  I suspect the set will end up looking beautiful before we are finished.  We’ll do a full read-though tonight, and also I’ll be passing out the teeshirts to the kids today.  Tomorrow, the entire cast wears a cast tee shirt, and I’ll have them wear them again on Friday too to help advertise for the play.  Things are coming together.  We have four more days, including today, and then opening night.  Its going to happen.  Things will work out.  But boy are we cutting it close.  But … the show must go on!

Peace out everybody!

 

Rain

I could not pull myself out of bed this morning.   Maybe because it was Monday, maybe because I was just tired, or maybe it was because of the rain.  Yes, you read that right; it actually was raining here today.  And the desert is thirsty too.  Its been cloudy and cold and dismal now all day, very much like a later Autumn day in Michigan.  I’m wearing a long sleeve shirt and still feeling the chill bite at me.  I ended up not making it to the gym this morning.  That’s only the third time since Halloween I’ve missed a workout; the others were for Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving.  I still have all day, though, maybe I’ll have an evening workout today instead so that I won’t have missed today.  Its funny how, even on a day such as this, my body still longs for a workout these days.  Its almost like it needs to feel that rush and that pain to be satisfied.

 

Yesterday was a good day

Every now and then you have one of those really good days, the types where it feels that nothing can go wrong.  Yesterday was one of those days for me.  The day started with learning that Melissa – the other eighth grade English teacher at my middle school – was going to have her baby yesterday.  It ended up not being true, as a I found out today, but that didn’t hamper the feeling yesterday of things just being right in their appropriate place.

The day started by learning that I had earned on a four on my last TPA – the highest possible score for the TPA – which was extremely good news.  I had suspected that I had done well on the examination, but hearing the news officially was a real boost.  After school, the day continued as several good guys showed up at the cafeteria to help with building the set for our play, A Christmas Carol.  Brandy and Danielle went off to buy costumes and while it still feels that the play has a long ways to go in the next eight days before opening night, it also feels as though we are making good progress.  The set is impressive and after it is painted later today and this weekend, will lend a real professional feel to our show.  Also it will give us pieces that can be continue to be re-used in later productions.  There was an Appleby site council meeting yesterday too and it was a late start.  Cast teeshirts were ordered yesterday and the professional posters arrived for our show and looked really nice.  They soon will be plastered all over Blythe.  (And today, we’re starting to make the top hats in theater class!)  Just a lot of little things felt right yesterday.

It just felt like a good day.  I hope I can maintain this sense of energy and enthusiasm right up through the end of the year and into the next.  There is still a lot to be accomplished in the coming months – including a dissertation!

 

Tearing Apart Books

Thomas Jefferson once said that he could not live without books.  I wear that quote around the lanyard that hangs over my chest each day.  His words – and his philosophy and love for books – literally hangs about my heart.  I adore the way the pages of an old book smell when you crack it open for the first time in decades.  The way it sounds and feels, the look of the broken aged paper that falls as you read.  I also love new books, the perfect white, the super tight binding just begging you to break it.

I love books, but I’m not careful with books at all.  I’ve bought books over a hundred  years old, and they fall apart as I read them over and over again, and I don’t care.  I’ll simply buy another.  I love the book, but I don’t love it in the way that I’ll set it on a shelf to preserve it.  I’d rather love it by destroying it.  At least that is what “true” book lovers tell me.

Recently, I cut the pictures from a book and hung them on my wall.  It was an art book, and filled with pictures of Shakespearean themed paintings and drawings.  I love them.  I loved them so much, I had to put them on the wall.  Another teacher saw my wall, and liked the collage I had created, but asked how I could fathom destroying a book to cut out the prints.  It was only when I told her that the it was a cheap book I had bought used that her rage seemed assuaged.  But the thing is, I am not entirely sure that that mattered to me.

I do love books.  I love books more deeply I think than just about anybody.  I love their power and their amazing ability to capture me in an unimaginable way.  I long for the books I don’t own, and often miss books when I am apart from them.  I take comfort in my books.  But I don’t treasure books.  I love them in this moment, not worrying about the next.  I make love violently with my books, ripping, shredding, even cutting out my favorite parts.  To some, that is sick.  I can only imagine what librarians reading this must be thinking.  But my love is as genuine as theirs.  Books exist to be loved; my way of loving my books is just different and not always accepted.  But that’s ok.  I suppose many of us are familiar with loving in a taboo way, a way not allowed.  But we still love.  And I’ll love my books too, even if in ways that others will never understand.

 

Washington DC

Today was my second day visiting Washington DC.  Brandy is in Michigan with her family, and I’m here doing some research.  I had initially planned on spending most of my time at the Folger Shakespeare Library, but have actually spent a lot more of my time working at the Library of Congress.  The Library of Congress is amazing; it has just about any book you could imagine!  I’m really interested in illustrations and paintings related to Shakespearean drama and the Library of Congress will let me scan the images; the Folger, though, is very strict about that and will not let me scan hardly anything at all.  So I’ve spent most of the last two days at the Library of Congress working through illustrated volumes of Shakespeare, reading and scanning away.

Today I focused on looking at the many different volumes of Charles and Mary Lamb’s “Tales from Shakespeare”.  This collection of Shakespeare inspired stories was originally penned in 1807; Charles wrote the tragedies, and Mary, his sister, wrote the comedies.  After its original publication, a new edition was printed every few years, sometimes more than one new edition in a year.  Oftentimes, the new editions proudly sported new illustrations, so these volumes have become an important source now of Shakespearean illustration for me.  I worked through some twenty odd volumes today, and still have over a dozen left to work through when I return to work in the morning.

Its fun work for me, and I am having a great time here.  I just wish I had more time; its all passing by so fast!

 

How Shakespeare is taught in the schools…

Now that school has started, I am back to work again on writing my dissertation, up shortly after four am and to school before anybody else to sit and write quietly at my desk.  I want to take a few moments now to capture in a blog post what I am doing and what I still need to do.

My primary emphasis right now is finishing my dissertation prospectus and getting it officially approved.  The idea for the dissertation is essentially that many artists have been inspired by Shakespearean drama to re-create this themes, characters, and stories in their own medium.  Mendelsohn wrote a symphony from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Painters have depicted Shakespearean imagry and scenes in their paintings over the past three centuries.  Sculpture, poetry, fiction and others have all taken Shakespeare and adapted it into something new and different.  My dissertation aims to explore some of the creative things done with Shakespeare and then glean from it what teachers can use to get their own students excited about learning about Shakespeare.

That’s the idea.  But right now I am focusing on the beginning still.  And I’ve been focusing on the beginning for a long time now.  I wrote a brief prospectus over the summer, but its was incomplete, and I’m working now on finishing up the bits and pieces I need to get the prospectus done.

One part of the dissertation is going to be about how Shakespeare came to be such an important figure in Education.  Its a question that has plagued me since before I even read my first Shakespeare play.  What is it about this one writer that makes him the king of our literary canon; does he deserve it and why? I’ve asked that question at least a million times, to myself, and to countless others.  I’ve heard a lot of reasons, but remain unsatisfied still today.  I know its more complex than most of teachers and scholars want to admit, and I want part of this dissertation to begin exploring that very complex question.  The problem, though, is that I really don’t have a satisfactory answer at all.  I suppose those are the best types of questions, but they are also mind boggling when you are at the beginning.

I’ve been re-reading Arthur Applebee’s “Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: a History” and going back to all of the parts where he addresses Shakespeare.  He has a few good references to Shakespeare’s first appearance in school texts and classrooms beginning around 1820 in a marginal way, and much more significantly beginning around 1870 and building into the icon we know today about 1900.

He tells an interesting story from 1807, in which 99 out of 175 Harvard students purchase a collected works of Shakespeare plays for personal study.  They do not buy the plays for their academic work, but to discuss them in their fraternal societies.  The universities believed that reading modern works such as Shakespeare was good for students, but not appropriate for a rigorous study required in the classroom.  That sounds so funny today, to suggest that Shakespeare is too “pop culture” to be appropriate in the classroom!  Shakespeare, though, grew out of this non-academic tradition.  I’d like to find more sources like this one to more fully paint the image of Shakespearean study at this time.

There was also some strong resentment to Shakespeare in the early 19th century around this time.  Applebee writes that in 1828, a Boston teacher was dismissed because he read Shakespeare aloud in his classes.  I’d like to know more details about that.  What did he read to them?  What forces pushed for his dismissal?  There must be more to the story.  I know that Shakespeare is filled with sex and violence (its why we all love him so) but I sense that this is a much more interesting story than Applebee relays to us.  Also, at Oberlin, Shakespeare was not permitted in mixed gender classes until 1860.  And even as late as 1893, the New England Journal of Education included an editorial supporting a class refusing to read Hamlet because of its “indecencies”.

This is my starting point right now.  I have a few other sources to work from, but not a lot yet, and need more help finding more historical information.  I do not believe there is actually an answer to my original question, not one that will satisfy me entirely, but I think persuing it will prove satisfying to me.

 

First Day of School

While I intended to write almost daily over the summer of my experinces with the NEH in Virginia, I now find that the summer has ended and I barely wrote at all in my blog.  So I’m not going to make promises I can’t keep and say I will write regularly of my teaching this year, but will say that you can expect an occassional reflection here of my middle school teaching and also my dissertation readings.

Today was a good day.  I worry about whether or not I can keep it up over the coming months, though.  I’ve never before actually taught the traditional one hour per day class, always having taught college courses and the double block courses here at the middle school.  My two one-hour blocks will be an experiment for me in careful time management.  I also worry about my curriculum.  As much as I am not a math teacher, I had grown accustomed to the math curriculum last year and felt comfortable with it.  As an English teacher, I’ll rely much less on the set curriculum and more heavily on my own resources.  That’s frightening.  This will be a marathon run for me in many ways.  Something new and exciting in so many ways.

Peace out.  I’ll try my best to reflect here more regularly on my work!  But no promises!

 

Stage Violence

Working through rehearsal today included learning a bit about stage violence.  In my scene as a messenger with Cleopatra I deliver a message that she does not particularly like – that Antony has married Octavia – and she takes out her agression on me.  Today we worked through staging that “fight” and I had a lot of fun.  In the scene, Alyssa slaps me twice, and then as I attempt to crawl away upstage, she kicks me in the bottom sending my flying belly first towards the audience.  Then she straddles me, rolls me over onto my back and gets right in my face, threatening me with a knife.  I’ve never done any work with stage violence at all, and must confess that today was great fun.  Its amazing just how real staged violence can look even though the actors barely come into contact with one another.

Peace out everybody!  Its storming tonight in Staunton!  Happy Tuesday night.