The stated goal of my two-week Julius Caesar unit in AP Language and Composition was to further students’ skills in rhetorical analysis. But there was also hidden goal. I wanted students to complete the unit (which ended right before Thanksgiving break) with an appreciation of Shakespeare. I wanted students to enjoy reading Shakespeare. I had a plan to achieve this. 

I formulated this plan by compiling input from my students, most of whom could not have been more resistant to the unit. When I hinted that we would be reading Shakespeare, they groaned. I teach two sections of AP Lang for a combined total of fifty two students. At the beginning of class a week prior to the unit I assigned them an anonymous pre-reading survey, which I had them complete on their phones. I only gave them a few minutes to complete it, with no time to refine their arguments; I simply wanted to know how they felt. 

They let me know their issues.  71% of students agreed or strongly agreed that they dislike reading Shakespeare (72% if you round up)…

Their explanations were typical of what I’ve heard the past three years from my students…

Their issues with Shakespeare, so they said, boiled down to three general gripes: 

It’s hard to read

It’s not interesting 

It’s not relevant (“overhyped”) 

To each of these complaints I had a response: 

It’s hard to read? Much of the writing in a college-level course like AP Lang has challenging diction and dated syntax. Granted, Shakespeare may be on the extreme end of the spectrum, but how else do you better unless you practice? I told my students they should be thanking me for the opportunity for guided practice to gain greater proficiency. (They did not thank me.) 

It’s not interesting? How can you make that judgement when you didn’t take the time to understand it? 

It’s not relevant? Shakespeare’s overhyped? HOW DARE YOU! 

The students accepted my rebuttals, but I could tell that I hadn’t won them over, which was in keeping with my previous honors and AP classes. I’ve found it surprising how much more skeptical these grade-conscious students are compared to the less academically driven students I used to teach. 

I spent my first seven years teaching at an alternative school in Frederick County, Virginia. I taught Shakespeare every semester, and never out of a mandate or a desire to frustrate students. Indeed, it just felt obvious, the same way a chemistry teacher exposes her students to the periodic table. During my seven years I taught whatever play I thought would connect best the group — Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, Much Ado about Nothing, the Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet. I took for granted the positive response Shakespeare received each semester — it was a given. Shakespeare, like Ben Johnson famously wrote, is for all time. Why shouldn’t his works be enjoyed by an apathetic high school senior in the Shenandoah Valley? Now I’m not saying that at the conclusion of the unit students were begging for more Shakespeare, but I never heard the amount of spurious arguments that filled the comments in my anonymous survey. 

But I don’t think the students in the anonymous survey were being completely truthful about their issues. While my students at the alternative school were not scholars, they were, however, comfortable not understanding every line of Shakespeare, and they were ok working through the text as a class. In our extremely structured (and often boring) alternative school environment, they enjoyed the opportunity to read the plays out loud and discuss the decisions of the characters, watching different interpretations. 

So why is the attitude toward Shakespeare so much more hostile with students for whom every metric would suggest are much stronger students? Students in honors and AP classes, from my observation, are suspicious of a text they can’t understand immediately. Most of them understand that language has evolved over four hundred years and Shakespeare wrote during a time that prized baroque wordplay– but that doesn’t mean they value it. To them it just means more work, which they will do, if begrudgingly, because they care about their grade. For my students at the alternative school, reading Shakespeare was just a way to fill the monotony of their school day. Most cared about their grades only to the point of passing class so they didn’t have to take it again. I remember watching the Laurence Fishburn Othello with a group of students who would all ultimately drop out of school before earning their diploma. That morning, however, they were enthralled by Shakespaeare. I think the high school students I now teach — most of whom have aspirations of not just attending college, but attending an elite college — are dismissive of Shakespeare because they associate the bard with added stress. If we could read the plays without grades attached, with just a simple goal to comprehend the works, savor the language, enjoy the experience, maybe their response would be different. 

We’ll never know, though, because I wasn’t about to teach an entire play without summative assignments. But I did have some plans to set students up for success as much as possible… 

1. Spend only five classes on the play. A recurring complaint from students is often that they spent an entire month or more reading Romeo and Juliet. I sympathize with this. However, to meaningfully work through a play in two weeks, I asked students to read outside of class. For Julius Caesar, I felt that the most important acts to read in class were Acts I and III. For homework I assigned Act II one night, and Act IV and V another. I gave a brief multiple choice quiz at the beginning of subsequent classes to hold them accountable for the reading. And unlike our class’s work with Shakespeare, which never used any modernized translations, I offered them links to No Fear Shakespeare for their homework. There’s no way to stop them, anyway, and I figured that if they at least understood the plot, we would be in a good place to engage with the text as a class.
2. Supply as much contemporary relevance to the text as possible. This is a play that deals with the nature of leadership, civic responsibility, the power of rhetoric, and the unstable power of the unwashed masses — among other things. It doesn’t take much to see modern parallels to contemporary events and to our AP Language and Composition class, which is all about close analysis of rhetoric. In preparing my lessons I relied heavily on Paul Cantor’s political analysis of the play, which I even offered as a resource to my students, a few of whom watched the lectures.
3. Provide activities that relate directly to the course. I gave a roadmap of the unit to my students to help them prepare for each class. Our stated goal was to improve rhetorical analysis, so we analyzed three different works of rhetoric from the play, first as a class, then in groups, then in small groups for a grade. At the end of the play I put together a series of Socratic-ish questions. I assigned pairs of students a side on and gave them thirty minutes to research and prepare an argument — pivoting from analyzing argument to crafting arguments of their own.  

The unit ended the Friday before Thanksgiving break. After the final summative activity, I made students complete the post-unit survey with the same circumstances — anonymous, short amount of time, just get your thoughts out.  

 

Reading their responses, I was pleased that many now felt neutral, with several students appreciating some of my conscious decisions in planning the lessons. Also, there weren’t as many complaints about relevance! Yet many of the same complaints remained: language is tough, plot is uninteresting. Students in general still seemed as receptive to Shakespeare as Macbeth to a ghost: “Avaunt, and quit my sight!”

In terms of rhetorical analysis, the unit had helped sharpen their skills. The time spent analyzing Marc Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral produced some of the most cogent and persuasive analysis I’d read from some students all year.

But my hidden goal of improving students’ appreciation of Shakespeare could not be regarded as anything better than a moderate failure. I went into the unit knowing that I probably wouldn’t succeed. But that’s a risk worth taking.

Because Shakespeare is indeed a writer for all time, one of the few writers for whom I am determined to shove down my students’ collective consciousness, and I’m not going to be satisfied until I am able to teach his work in such a way that students can’t help but at least acknowledge the value of his writing. I already have ideas for next year. I think I should do more to convey Shakespeare’s place as a foundation of Western literature. Like classical epics and biblical stories, you need to be cognizant of them, even if you don’t like them. You also need to be aware of his influence on literature. Perhaps a chapter from Steven Greenblatt’s very readable and instructive Will in the World might help. 

I’ll continue adding ideas. I’m planning to teach Othello with my English 12 classes, and hopefully what I’ve learned this fall will help improve their experience. I’m not delusional enough to think that I’ll convert every student I teach. I understand that my clients are teens. But I don’t want them to be philistines.