I’m taking a shameless victory lap. Or, perhaps more appropriately, I should say that I am placing the oaken garland upon my head. My English 10 honors students just completed a month-long unit in which they read Coriolanus and (most of) Julius Caesar. In addition to comprehension quizzes and in-class discussions, they wrote an argumentative essay that compared the two plays, which they converted into presentations that they shared in-class this week. 

But my victory lap is not simply due to the fact that I forced students to undergo this experience, an experience perhaps as daunting as Caius Martius rushing alone through the enemy gates of Coriole. Rather, it’s because of the results of an anonymous survey I gave yesterday…

(48 of my 52 honors students responded to this survey) 

That four out of five students came away from this unit with a positive experience is a reason for celebration, especially since the students don’t even know how they did on the essay/presentation. In my view, this makes their response more purely tied to the experience of reading and writing about these plays. Hence my victory lap. 

I wish I had thought to survey my students before the unit started to get a sense of their expectations and their opinions on reading Shakespeare. In my experience, students have a few common complaints about reading the Bard. The first is that it’s difficult to understand, and the second is that teachers spend too much time on a play. I don’t disagree with either complaint. In fact, I find that they’re linked. Because there are so many games with language and because the diction itself is so daunting (I just learned the other day that Shakespeare’s 37 plays use 21,000 different words, 12,000 more than the King James Bible) teachers often dutifully and meticulously work through each line, a painstaking process (emphasis on the “pain” part). The experience, therefore, is that plays that have a theatrical run-time of three hours end up occupying a class for weeks, sometimes months, sometimes even an entire quarter. How can a teenager find that enjoyable? Indeed, no college class that I’m aware of ever bothers to labor over a single work longer than a few weeks.       

My solution was to spend no longer than four classes on each play. We read an act in class, and students had to read an act for homework. I made reading comprehension worksheets, which were formative checks for understanding, and were designed to make sure students understood the most important parts of each scene. If there were words or phrases that needed extra attention, I would do so in class. The subsequent reading quizzes drew from these worksheets. Students also had access to the NoFearShakespeare version of our first play, Coriolanus, which I encouraged them to use when they had to read for homework.   

When reading in class, we used Shakespeare’s text. I would read a lot of the parts, but I also recruited volunteers. My eighth block, with their end-of-the-day energy, had more enthusiastic volunteers than their sleepy fifth block peers. Sometimes I showed bits and pieces from stage and theatrical productions. But I prioritized getting through the plays as efficiently as possible, and it was helpful that both plays have streamlined plots. 

The relatability of the characters and plots was also helpful. As I expected, students found the character of Coriolanus a grimly comical mess of a man – or, as many of the student’s pointed out, a sociopathic man-child. And his mother, so domineering and possessive of her son, provoked some of the most sustained laughs I’ve heard in my classes this year. My eighth block was especially quick to appreciate the utter Karen-ness of her character, which starts from her very first lines, in which she offhandedly offers a troubling hypothetical to her daughter-in-law: 

Another choice I made in the interest of efficiency was to only read the first three acts of Julius Caesar. I didn’t tell the students this when we started it, and indeed I didn’t even know for sure I was going to do it until the pacing revealed I would be pushing into January with our present pacing. But the decision was not without precedent. When I teach Julius Caesar in AP Lang, I conclude it with Act III. As I tell the students, the play is effectively over at this point: the title character is dead, Rome is in chaos, and we know that the republican-minded characters will lose. To this no student ever puts up too much of a complaint.    

What they didn’t realize, however, is that the end of the play would mean writing a comparative essay. I guess I should qualify that, though: the essay was argumentative and required the use of quotes from both plays as evidence. (The more I teach, the more I believe that coherent and thoughtful argumentative writing is the hardest skill for students to master…and yet it is the most beneficial when they do master it.) I came up with a series of silly questions that could be reasonably answered on either side…

Their paper had to be accompanied by a presentation. I emphasized that the presentation had to showcase strong public speaking skills on the part of the presenters. These presentations occurred on the Monday before winter break, leaving the last two classes for a letter-writing assignment and general festive merriment.  

The presentations were fun, and many were even convincing. Here’s a sampling… 

As my victory lap comes to a close, I should note that my survey had one additional question: would the students be interested in reading more Shakespeare after this? 

As always, there is room for improvement on my part — to assert otherwise would be to immulate the less appealing characteristics of Martius and Julius. I could do a better job making Shakespeare more tantalizing for impressionable intelligent minds. I am happy with the success this fall, and I’m excited to potential do better in the future. Perhaps the solution next year is to finish the Roman trilogy and add Antony and Cleopatra to the mix…