I attended my 20-year high school reunion on Saturday. It was a lot of fun to see what everyone’s up to now. It was also a bit strange, because we were only 18 when we graduated, so it really was half a lifetime ago that we all knew each other. We’re all different people now, almost strangers, yet we have a knowledge of each other that in some ways is far more intimate than the friends we make today.<\/p>\n
I also saw my 9th-grade English teacher, the first teacher ever to assign me to read Shakespeare. Of course, I very much enjoyed letting him know what I’m up to now, and he seemed very pleased as well. It made me think of my first Shakespeare experience, reading The Tempest<\/em> in his class. I didn’t really understand it, but I was determined that I was going to, and eventually I did.<\/p>\n The Tempest<\/em> seems like kind of an odd choice to use to introduce students to Shakespeare for the first time, though I can’t really see anything wrong with it. He also had taught us the Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It<\/em>, which might also have been a good first play. Usually when I’m working with 5th-graders, I’m introducing them to Shakespeare for the first time, and I generally go with Macbeth<\/em> or A Midsummer Night’s Dream<\/em>. I recently did Cymbeline<\/em> with an 8th-grade class, but they had already read Romeo and Juliet<\/em>, another good choice.<\/p>\n Then there are other plays, like King Lear<\/em> or Troilus and Cressida<\/em>, that I don’t think are good choices for young children. I was once asked to teach Antony and Cleopatra<\/em> to 6th-grade students, and it went well, but I think Julius Caesar<\/em> might have been a more appropriate choice. I also worked with a teacher who, against my advice, wanted to teach Othello<\/em> to his 8th-grade class. I was so wrong; that went really well. I thought the play was too mature for them, but those kids taught me a thing or two.<\/p>\n So the Question of the Week, if it’s not obvious by now, is this:<\/p>\n What play would you choose to introduce Shakespeare to a group of students for the first time?<\/em><\/p>\n Does your answer change with the grade level? What if an adult friend of yours who had never read Shakespeare asked for a recommendation? Do you go with one of the masterpieces, or a fun easy read? Is one genre better than another for a first-timer? Or do you go with something you’re passionate about, so your enthusiasm can be infectious?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I attended my 20-year high school reunion on Saturday. It was a lot of fun to see what everyone’s up to now. It was also a bit strange, because we were only 18 when we graduated, so it really was half a lifetime ago that we all knew each other. We’re all different people now, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,57,62,16,122,58,52,125,24,3,87,126,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antony-and-cleopatra","category-as-you-like-it","category-cymbeline","category-education","category-julius-caesar","category-king-lear","category-macbeth","category-othello","category-question","category-shakespeare","category-teaching-shakespeare","category-tempest","category-the-dream"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shakespeareteacher.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shakespeareteacher.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shakespeareteacher.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shakespeareteacher.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shakespeareteacher.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1003"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.shakespeareteacher.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4659,"href":"https:\/\/www.shakespeareteacher.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions\/4659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shakespeareteacher.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shakespeareteacher.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shakespeareteacher.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}