It really is torture to listen to some people read.
He'd prefer that Shakespeare be introduced first by the drama department in early secondary school so that kids as young as 13 or 15 could perform Romeo and Juliet at their intended character ages - thus bringing the work to life.
And that only once they've experienced the energy of performance that later in final years of 16-17 should they study it formally in English Literature classes.
This reminds me of reading I needed to learn C++ to make games back in the early 2000s, because that was what all games were made with. I probably missed 3-4yrs of programming exposure because I found C++ so impenetrable from the local library books I got on the subject.
Working from appreciation of the subject matter, to a light introduction to the inner workings, to the hairy details of how it was all put together seems to be the ideal approach.
Although this analogy may be a bit more niche and involved, the idea of being forced to read Shakespeare at a young age before being able to really appreciate the plays in production, with all of it's subtleties, seems comparable to attempting to pushing their heads into C++ before they appreciate the basic mechanics of game construction.
Someone can read a play and not understand it. That happens. But to understand a work you first have to at least read it. Watching can be a poor substitute, but good luck finding any modern production that performs an entire Shakespeare piece. Most everything on modern stages is heavily edited for time.
I have also been told that the reason Macbeth is so short is that it was probably transcribed from the working (cut) copy of the play rather than the original draft.
I'm also curious as to what else y'all read, given that Shakespeare wrote 30+ plays, and at a rate of one every week or two, that's just about an entire school year spent on nothing else.
I strongly disagree. A solid base in mathematics, critical thinking, and the ability to say "I'm not getting anything out of this, I should switch to something else" are far more important.
is virtually useless if you don't actually know anything. One of the best ways to learn new things is by reading.
Critical thinking comes from problem solving, something a book certainly lacks.
Yes, one can read without doing any critical thinking. But scientific and technical literature invite it. And indeed, require it for real comprehension. Good fiction, too.
If that were true, you would believe anything and everything you read. I doubt that, barring Trump tweets, I will read a more ignorant statement all week.
I'm genuinely confused as to the worldview that says that the earlier doesn't come with the later as a necessary cause, unless we're talking absolutely trivial levels of math/critical thinking...
I mean, it's right there in what I wrote. How you jump to an insane, uncharitable interpretation that I'm advocating not reading is beyond me.
(Naturally, this didn't do any favors for anyone, except when someone got to exclaim "BRING ME MY LONG SWORD, HOE!" in class.)
Without at least a year of practice (and even then...), the results will be atrocious, humiliating even, and the students will be even less convinced.
You should not study Shakespeare in school, it needs a lot of things to be appreciated, and hence it's a terrible material given the school constraints.
When you read it, most people follow the lexical rhythm. It makes not sense. You are supposed to speak naturally, with the emotion and speed matching the context.
But again, I never had any teachers remotely good enough to realize that and do anything about it.
On key problem is that you need to be really good to be a decent teacher, and after sampling 11 schools because of my father's work, probably encountered 2 teachers that had the skills and cared enough.