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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

I visited the Folger Shakespeare Library on Monday.  Its been a long week, though, and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down and reflect on the experience.  It was a great trip; we left together on a bus about 7:45 in the morning and didn’t get back until after eleven in the evening.  It wasn’t necessarily a productive trip; I wasn’t able to do any actual reading or writing at the library, but it was still exciting to be so close to so many rare and important books in the scholarship of Shakespeare.

The highlight of the visit was seeing a couple of first folios of Shakespeare, the most important rare book in the English languare.  Sadly, though, we weren’t allowed to touch these priceless treasures.  And we especially were not allowed to sit and page through one and read them as scholars in the reading room are allowed to do.  That got me thinking about how very much I would like to just sit down with a first folio and read through a favorite play, probably “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.  To just sit there and read for two hours and work through one of my favorite plays.  I’m not sure that is really a scholarly thing to do.  But I can’t imagine a more satisfying way to spend a Saturday morning than with such an amazing book filled with so much history and power.

I really want to do this.  I’m looking into what it will take to officially become a reader and I think I have the qualifications needed to do so.  You’re just required to get letters of recommendation from two scholars and either hold a PhD or be working in a program towards your PhD.  That’s me!  So why not?  Right?  I’ll let you know how it turns out!

Yesterday’s Independence Day celebration party ended our first week of the program and also Dr. Tiffany Stern’s work with our group.  A preiminent scholar in theater history at Oxford University with several important publications that have shaped how we understand the original practices on Shakespeare’s stage and particularly how theater is done at the Blackfriars theater here in Staunton, it was amazing to have had the opportunity to work with such an amazingly smart and important thinker.  What we noticed just as much, though, as her scholarship, was how friendly and truly compassionate she was with all of the participants in the program.  I feel as though I learned and grew as much in her three morning lectures as I could have in an entire semester.  And I certainly hope to have the opportunity to see more of her work in the future.

Having intended to reflect daily this month on my experiences here in Staunton, I now find myself at day five and only having have written once thus far.  So many exciting things are going on here already this week.  I can’t begin to tell you stimulating the past days have been, and I think I have learned as much in this one week as I’ve learned in an entire course previously.

This past week focused on the history of Shakespeare’s theater – with an emphasis, of course, on Shakespeare’s Blackfriars theater, of which they have built a replica here in Staunton.  That theater is housed in a very modern building, with an industrialized architecture throughout the inside, that is, until you enter the theater.  The theater itself is like stepping back in time; its playing space is absolutely gorgeous.  The theater, though, exists not just as a monument to Shakespearean theater, but a laboratory for exploring Shakespeare in the contexts of how it was originally performed four hundred years ago.  Much of their practices are based upon the work of theater historians.

The most interesting and obvious feature of the theater is that they perform in the light.  Their motto is “We do it with the lights on”.  Original Shakespeare was performed in candlelight, and here they use electric candlelight – which better adheres to local fire code I am sure – to illuminate the entire theater evenly throughout the play.  The effect can be dissettling.  Not only can you see the players on the stage, but they can see you as well, and even more significantly, you are able to see the other members of the audience.  This results in a very different experience for the audience, one in which they become much part of the show itself than in typical modern theater.  Actors regularly point out audience members as they speak addressing them directly.  Those members sitting on stools upon the stage – another Early Modern stage practice – are drawn most deeply into the action, holding props and even being invited to dance along with the players from time to time.

In addition to the academic side, I’ve been to two shows thus far – Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure – and am excited at just how different this theater company is.  This is an exciting place for me right now, to be in a city that lives and breathes Shakespeare and so excitedly embraces the history of the theater so many have grown to love.

I’ll strive to write more regularly – daily if I can – over the next few weeks to keep my friends abreast of my work thus far.

Tonight are the fourth of July celebrations here.  I’m looking forward to a fun Friday night!  I hope your celebrations are happy too!  Peace out everybody!

Life has been pushing forward the past weeks at a breakneck pace.  I last wrote from Lincoln and since spent a week in Michigan, a night in New York City, and arrived Sunday afternoon in Staunton, Virginia.  Yesterday was the first real day of NEH Shakespeare program and the day really confirmed that this is the right place for me to be right now, the right place for me to spend my summer.

I had been excited about the program since I decided to apply in December, but still maintained my reservations.  Its not easy for a teacher to volunteer five weeks of the summer to spend buried in their work, but in this case, I can’t imagine a more satisfying way to spend these summer weeks.  This whole town lives and breathes Shakespeare.  Its love affair with his theater, and the history of that theater, is intoxicating.  I already feel so deeply inspired, so ready to dive even deeper into the material I love so much, to look at more deeply from new perspectives.

A final project for the program will be our collective performance of Shakespeare’s classical ‘Antony and Cleopatra’.  Our total group has been divided into several smaller groups, each responsible for an eighth of the play.  In our time here we are responsible for preparing our scene, which we’ll be performing on the final day of the project.  What’s most exciting about this, though, is that we are exploring the original practices and conditions for how Shakespeare’s company originally performed those plays some four hundred years ago, and learning from those practices how to better read, perform, and experience Shakespeare.

I plan to write regularly while here, keeping a log of these experiences, so check back here often.  I’ll fill you in our progress as we work!

Till then, peace out everybody!  Happy Tuesday!

I think one of the strongest strategies I have for teaching math is utilizing the students in the classrooms as tutors and teachers themselves.  I have several students who I know work well in groups and with their peers and I often make a point when assigning practice exercises to roam the room checking on their progress, knowing that if they have mastered particular material they will be certain that their peers around them learn the material as well.

Teachers know that children learn best when they have an opportunity to teach what they have learned to another student.  Thus, when I stretch to reach those students who will become my “tutors” I know that those particular students will be served doubly, first in learning the material, and then in the reinforcement of that material when they teach to their peers.

I also know that many of my students are easily frustrated by teachers and traditional learning.  They don’t learn well from a direct instruction approach, and instead learn much better in smaller, more relaxed settings, where they have a peer showing them how to complete a particular problem or master a particular skill.  Thus such an approach truly serves these students well too.  They first see me present direct instruction, but then have the opportunity for the material to be made clear as their peer tutors helps them work through the material.