> The additional layer of linguistic distance between them and Shakespeare is comparable to my own struggles through Chaucer in the original Middle English

I guess I don't talk to enough high school kids but is this really actually true? There has been ~200 years of linguistic evolution between when this teacher went to school and now? English has changed as significantly as it did between

"Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote"

and

"But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun."

Wasn't the theory that recorded media would decrease the rate of core linguistic evolution? There has always been slang, but I would call this a total false equivalence.