Much Ado About Nothing

Seventeen years ago I was a middle school English teacher in what would now be called a high-poverty, high-risk-of-failure school district in Ohio. This was before American teachers had Curriculum Standards, and High Stakes Testing data to tell them that their students were being “Left Behind.” Somehow, without any testing data, I figured out that my fourteen-year-old students weren’t getting enough to eat, talked and wrote about a lot of crime and violence in their daily lives and needed an education of the highest quality to move on in life.

The school’s reading textbooks were expensive and lavashly colorful. They were also very large and very heavy, difficult to carry and filled with dull, boring stories that no one would ever choose to read, even if stranded on a desert island. They apparently were designed by a committee in Texas whose goal was to instill a deep hatred for literature and the English language in the young.

And so I locked the textbooks up in a cabinet and started teaching with the goal of reaching Shakespeare. I partnered with another English teacher, bought a lot of supplemental materials and books and spent late nights at the copying machine.

What do you need to know to really enjoy Shakespeare’s language? The answer is a a lot of stuff. We started with Ovid and Mythology. Then we moved on to the Romans and the Latin language. The kids loved the Cambridge Latin Course http://amzn.to/1z2WZAT. We did all of Unit One occasionally wearing togas. Latin built their confidence in being able to translate unfamiliar sentence structure. Next, we immersed the students in Medieval and Renaissance history and daily life. We cooked a Medieval Feast using recipes from The Medieval Baker’s Daughter by Madeleine Pelner Cosman http://amzn.to/1BkYKf4.

We started exploring Shakespeare with Baz Luhrmann’s film of Romeo and Juliet. The kids loved the violence, thought the ending was stupid, and maybe didn’t mind memorizing the Palmer’s Sonnet as much as they said they did.

And then I made a major mistake. I scheduled a field trip to the local Renaissance festival for our 120 students. An hour after we arrived I noticed that most of our girls were walking around with roses. Romeo and Juliet had inspired one of our shortest thirteen year old boys to steal $234 of flowers from the shop at the festival. As I was explaining to the flower stand owner that I hadn’t brought my checkbook, my partner teacher arrived with two of our girls and a fully costumed Shakespeare holding a handkerchief to his bleeding nose. The two girls had started a loud name-calling fist fight with each other during his performance. He had bravely left the stage to attempt to break them apart, receiving a sound punch in the nose for his efforts.Total immersion in the period was working a little too well that day!

Not in the least discouraged, we moved on to Branagh’s Much Ado and found that this sunny adaptation had depths that touched my young student’s lives. Hateful siblings, fathers whose tempers quickly turned to abuse and violence, shyness and uncertain feelings about who to love and who is loved, these were emotions my students understood far better than the idealized romance of Romeo and Juliet. They liked the play, demanded to see it again immediately. Bantered Beatrice and Benedick’s lines to each other. Dogberryed at me endlessly and talked on and on about its characters, injustice, deceit. It was without a doubt one of the happiest times of my life. I had, at least for those kids, saved the English language and its greatest writer from that Texas textbook committee.