Focus and Finish

Rejections, Waves, and Shakespeare

Rejections rolled in like waves. It was not the spring break I had hoped for.

I had been so glad for time off of work to focus on and finish essays that I mentioned in Acorns and Commonplace Journals. Over spring break, I submitted articles to three websites. Not one was a fit.

Two weeks later I found a home for one of those and am waiting to hear from another editor. In ebb and flow, one wave brings a rejection, the next brings success—and something has to ride those waves. The writing has to happen.

Thomas Kidd has encouraged me over the years as he’s described his consistent writing habits. This week he cited the steady efforts of a prolific man with Frederick Douglass on Productivity. Douglass argues for order and discipline over bursts of productivity.

Frankly, I’ve been in the land of bursts for awhile and need to rediscover my rhythm, my habit. I need to shift from the act of striving to the act of resting, to settle in to the writing. It’s hard for me to describe, but it’s getting past the dominance of my own mind. Settling in and resting in the writing are the moments where I feel I hear and sense God working through me and my words.

Gustave Courbet ᐧ The Wave ᐧ 1870

In the classroom

Teaching Shakespeare is a delight. In another week or so, I get to teach The Tempest for the first time, and I can hardly wait.

Every teacher knows, however, that Shakespeare is not an immediate delight to students, at least not at first. Shakespeare requires some steady steering. My favorite approach with ten-year-olds and up is to begin with Shakespeare’s life and his exposure to his very first stage at age 4 with the troupes that came through Stratford-upon-Avon.

Biographies and biographical material abound for Shakespeare, so finding the right story matters, and I do mean story. Students come to Shakespeare with judgment before they’ve read their first play. I think reading the story of Shakespeare the boy, the man, seems to dissolve preconceptions, and I fully believe that scholar Marchette Chute has mastered this craft. This year I was able to find used copies of An Introduction to Shakespeare for my high school students, and we will read her short account from cover to cover. Whether 10 or 18 or 30, students truly enjoy Chute’s story.

With my older students, I like to pull chapters from Chute’s full biography, Shakespeare of London. I reviewed it for The Imaginative Conservative a few years back in The Best Shakespeare Story Ever. More than one chapter deals with the rigorous training a successful actor had to go through. From the physicality of stunts, fencing, and dancing to the ability to sing and capture an audience with voice, the requisite skills of an actor were truly gifts in a competitive field. The repertoire of one actor, let alone an active company, was a teeming stock of stories.

The story of Shakespeare’s life life easily leads us to drink of the stories he created. And this is the difficult transition.

In our faculty meeting this week, my teachers and I read Mortimer Adler’s brief essay, “How To Read a Difficult Book.” He argues for a “twice-read” approach. Read once for a whole, not thorough, impression, then read a second time for detail and meaning. Adler says,

Shakespeare was spoiled for generations of high school students who were forced to go scene by scene, to look up all the words new to them, and to study all the scholarly footnotes. As a result, they never actually read the play. Instead they were dragged through it . . . They should have been encouraged to read the play in one sitting. Only then would they have understood enough of it to make it possible for them to understand more.

Our faculty enjoyed talking through how this approach does and doesn’t work with different types of readings. But all I could think of was Shakespeare. Adler’s approach does work. I modify it to read through a scene twice, especially with students brand new to the Bard. It is true that I will continue to coax and coach students to push through, to keep reading, to not be discouraged by Elizabethan English but to press for overall meaning first.

But what happens when students balk at the sight of the water?

Last year for the first time when teaching The Merchant of Venice, I had two students actually refuse to try, claiming that they weren’t smart enough. Those of you who teach may be nodding your heads, but it was new to me. Really new. What do I call this dis-ease? Is it a special student fallacy? Shakespeare defiance?

We had studied Chute’s brilliant Chapter 5 from Shakespeare of London. My class was captured by the descriptions of swordplay and stage effects, but it was not enticement enough. I had to offer a compromise. For each Act we read, we would watch a stage performance of The Merchant of Venice. Thank goodness for BritBox! We watched the 1980 BBC Shakespeare version. In an ideal class, we would have watched the Act first then read through it. Yet, with this group of students, the stage play was the reward for reading aloud with me.

We made it through, but in some ways I felt I caved to bad attitudes instead of leading students to delight in the ways Shakespeare captures human nature. That dichotomy fairly describes the struggles many passionate teachers feel in the classroom every day. That in itself could be its own series of articles!

I would love to hear from you in the comments. What do you think? What of Adler’s approach to read a thing twice? What about Shakespeare? What was your experience in reading him in school or teaching his sonnets or plays? Let’s learn from each other.

As always, thanks for reading! And don't forget that the List Library at my website is always available to you, my readers.

Christine