One of the things I loved about teaching both French and English was the opportunities I had to delve into each subject and create imaginative bulletin boards for my students. Back in the day I collected many many bits and pieces sure to attract those amazing teenagers and help them develop the same love for my subjects as I had.
One of the bulletin boards centered around the bard in preparation for my grade eleven class beginning Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or the Scottish play as those superstitious actors always call it. I had large posters and personal pictures of my visit to Stratford-on-Avon with my husband. We had walked in Shakespeare’s actual house so that on my wall play covers and actors danced around the Globe Theatre recreating Shakespeare’s time.
Our classes were 75 minutes long. On the first day studying Macbeth I announced a witch contest. I got the usual groans and resigned looks but I acted out the whole scene for them complete with three different witch voices and the students got into the mood. Fun to laugh at your teacher! They divided into groups of 3 and began to plan their presentations of the opening scene. You remember it:
Macbeth
ACT I SCENE I
A desert place.
[Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches]
First Witch
When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
Second Witch
When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
Third Witch
That will be ere the set of sun.
5
First Witch
Where the place?
Second Witch
Upon the heath.
Third Witch
There to meet with Macbeth.
First Witch
I come, graymalkin!
Second Witch
Paddock calls.
10
Third Witch
Anon!
ALL
Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
[Exeunt]
Save
It was great fun and the kids had a ball. From there jumping into the rest of the play was easy. Already the kids had memorized their witch parts complete with their individual witch cackles and crackly voices which they loved to use out of the blue. Sometimes I’d even hear them in the hall.
In Grade 9 we studied Merchant of Venice with our classes. That was the first Shakespearean play I taught and I assigned my students Portia’s speech, “The quality of mercy is not strain’d”, to memorize. The hard task of memorizing that strange language helped them to understand it better and the more the students practised in groups the more I heard that understanding in their voices. And I could ask them more interesting test questions based on those few lines they knew.
That first year of teaching my dad asked me what play I was doing with the kids. Immediately my 55-year-old father, whose days in school had long since faded to distant memories, recited flawlessly Portia’s magnificent speech. What a gift! To me, certainly, but also to him that his schooling allowed him to do that and still know it all those years later.
King Lear was the play I studied in Grade 13 (back when we still had grade 13!) and I loved it. Those three daughters just came alive as did Lear’s ridiculous idea of equating empty words with actual love. Cordelia was such a strong character.
And then I took an extra English credit to increase my teaching qualifications. Fourteen Shakespearean plays. Not the way to study them. To this day I know all the titles and most of the plots but the rest is a blur. Hamlet, though, just shone. The thing that most surprised me was all the lines I already knew from that play without even realizing where they originated. I guess a few others thought it was fabulous, too! Here’s a list of famous quotations from Hamlet.
If you were vigilant you probably saw references to Shakespeare’s birthday and death day over the last few days. They are reported to be April 23 but only the death day is known for certain. His baptism was April 26, 1564 leaving scholars to assume he was born three days earlier but no one knows for sure. Of course he died April 23, 1616, having lived and written through the Elizabethan age with Elizabeth I and her defeat of the Spanish Armada.
What I most adore about Shakespeare’s story and those of countless other writers is their contributions to their world and to the worlds forever after. Here we are all these years later still learning from Shakespeare, Hemingway, Twain, Potter (Beatrix), Dickens, Austen, Christie, Angelou, Poe, Rand and thousands of others. As I do my daily writing I pledge to remember how important our writing is, not just for today but for all the days to come. Won’t you join me in that thought?
The Loyalist’s Wife, The Loyalist’s Luck, The Loyalist Legacy
Jean Little and her sister who assisted in Jean’s presentation.
This past June I was lucky enough to attend a writers’ conference in downtown Toronto, Ontario. Such a plethora of choice sessions to attend made my two days there very interesting but the best for me was going to hear Jean Little give the Margaret Laurence Lecture which is always entitled “A Writer’s Life”.
I knew this would be interesting as Jean Little’s writing helped send me on my own writing journey. I well remember sitting on my back porch and finishing Listen For the Singing, one of Little’s books I read for a Children’s Literature course I was taking at the time. As I closed the book the tears came and I remember wishing so hard that I could write that well that I couldn’t stop crying. You see, Jean Little is almost blind but has risen to the top of her profession. What an icon she is.
Now the second thing which made me want to attend Little’s lecture was the name of the Canadian author whose name graces the event. Margaret Laurence. As a young stay-at-home-mother searching the local library for books, I found Laurence’s Jest of God. And my mother lent me her copy of The Fire Dwellers. Both of these books seemed to reach right into my soul and know what I was thinking and feeling. The first is about a single school teacher in the Canadian prairies and her sad struggle to find a life and to recognize who she is. The second deals with her sister suffering through a less than perfect marriage in Vancouver, both sisters shaped by their prairie upbringing with an undertaker father and the down sides of living in a small town. I could relate to all of this even though my own story is nothing like these.
With every new book that Laurence produced, I went further into my own coming of adult age. The woman just seemed to pick topics so current and so poignant that they touched me. Later I was lucky enough to teach The Stone Angel to my senior English classes, and the story of Morag Gunn came to life in The Diviners. Laurence wrote several other novels and many short stories but The Stone Angel is the one for which she is revered even though it was, at one point, removed from school curricula as a result of extremist book banning actions.
It took me a lot of years to find the exact right combination of life circumstances to reach out and become a writer myself but these two women certainly egged me on. When my son asked me if there was anything I wished I had done in my life so far, I said, “Write a novel.” It just popped out. He replied with all the reasons he thought the timing was perfect. “If not now, when?” he asked.
One of the things I loved about teaching both French and English was the opportunities I had to delve into each subject and create imaginative bulletin boards for my students. Back in the day I collected many many bits and pieces sure to attract those amazing teenagers and help them develop the same love for my subjects as I had.
Now the second thing which made me want to attend Little’s lecture was the name of the Canadian author whose name graces the event. Margaret Laurence. As a young stay-at-home-mother searching the local library for books, I found Laurence’s Jest of God. And my mother lent me her copy of The Fire Dwellers. Both of these books seemed to reach right into my soul and know what I was thinking and feeling. The first is about a single school teacher in the Canadian prairies and her sad struggle to find a life and to recognize who she is. The second deals with her sister suffering through a less than perfect marriage in Vancouver, both sisters shaped by their prairie upbringing with an undertaker father and the down sides of living in a small town. I could relate to all of this even though my own story is nothing like these.