Listen to the Silences

Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, one of the greatest musicians to ever walk the planet, once said that “In music, silence is more important than sound.”

I’d broaden that advice out a bit:  in life, silence is more important than the sound and fury of constant chatter in this age of instant communication.  Lately, I’ve lost the ability to hear that silence.  This is, at least in part, due to the obsessive roar of my own engines churning up that vacant space in the universe.  I need to send a message to the battlefield of everyday life:  shut up and listen!

A while back, I wrote up a list of thirteen theses statements about how to live.  My hope was that the statements would offer me the opportunity to reflect on how I comport myself each day.  The list was written somewhere in the past and dutifully filed away only to be buried by more pressing matters, more words, words, words cascading and falling through my life.  Number one on this list was to listen to the silences.  I remember I got it from a poster I used to hang in my classroom each year:  “Listen to the silences that you are unaware of.”  It bothered me that such a great saying ended in a preposition, so I dropped that part when I typed up my list.  I enjoyed the paradox:  how can you hear the absence of sound?  If you are unaware of the silence, how do you know it is there?  We know that sounds will always exist, but silence is, well, silent.  Wouldn’t it take special equipment to detect the absence of sound?  Can the absence of a clue be a clue?  I realized that to detect silence requires a stillness in the core of ourselves.  It means appreciating, indeed, living in, the space between.

In the classroom, sound can be an assault:  students coming in from a noisy recess; a teacher giving a lecture; groups of students engaged in a lively activity.  With my students, I must listen to what they are not saying as much as what they are saying.  Their individual narratives come out in words, but also in silence.  Often I can tell by how students look at each other whether or not they are on task.  Guilt is visible on faces if I just watch the group dynamic for a few seconds.  When we are discussing something as a class, my questions often hang in the air.  This desire on my part to elicit a response could result in no response out of shame or embarrassment or lack of understanding.  Very few people are secure enough in their person to say “I don’t get it.”  They are afraid of ridicule, of being exposed as frauds.  The voices in their heads are screaming, “Don’t give yourself away.”  As the teacher, I need to ignore the frantic feeling that no one is connecting because it is so silent.  I need to read the body language and try to find a way to blow open the doors to communication and get them talking.  In lieu of that, I need to absorb and appreciate my students not speaking.

In recognition of their uncomfortable silence, it might take one more question, or several questions, to get them to open up.  It might take a story from me to make them feel comfortable enough to contribute their own narratives.  But until that happens, it is not a good feeling to be standing in front of a class in uncomfortable, even painful silence.  I really have trouble with those silences.  I have to fight not to fill them with my own words, to tell too many stories.  I have to remind myself that thought takes silence.  In short, silence is critical to thinking and to our lives.  We must avoid what Shakespeare labeled idiot talk “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  As teachers, as human beings living in an age of cacophony, we must become comfortable with the silences.  Relish them. Feel them.

How in the world do we do this?

Could it be as simple as saying nothing whenever possible?  Can we teach with silence?  Can we register our dissent or approval by not speaking?  Is it like the Buddhist idea that the highest form of action is inaction?

I believe the answer to these questions is a resounding (not silent) yes, but it takes an inordinate amount of self-control because as a species, language is so important in the conveyance of ideas, thoughts, and dreams.  It is no accident that the tongue, inch by inch, is the strongest muscle in the human body.

But greater minds know the worth of silence.

“A word is worth one coin; silence, two.”  The Talmud.

The Bible?  “Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise…”  Proverbs 17:28.  “If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.”  Proverbs 18:13.

The Koran?  “Speak a good word or remain silent.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.:  “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”  Is he chastising friends for not speaking up against the enemies?

Confucius:  “Silence is a true friend who never betrays.”

Lao Tzu:  “Silence is a source of great strength.”

It is clear, and a cliché, that silence is golden.  From someone who makes his living from words, I need to be mindful of the value of silence.  Perhaps that is why it is first on my list of thirteen theses.  They were drafted in no particular order and for no particular pressing reason that I can remember now.  I found them in an undated file in a stack of folders on a corner of my desk.  Remember the cascade of words, words, words?  The list was typed but I could not find the document anywhere on my computer.  The list is undated, the context of the drafting unknown.

Whatever the reason I wrote these thirteen down, I recognize their importance in the here and now.  So, periodically, I will take one and explore it in a little essay.  As for number one, I will listen to the silences and the wisdom they contain.  I will be aware of them, these silences, and I will welcome them.

Real Talk For Real Teachers

There is no shortage of books about education, and most of them are not positive.  The line of critics telling us what is wrong in our schools, with our teachers, and with students today, stretches to infinity.  If someone does manage to sneak through a book extolling something positive that is happening in the classroom, he is shouted down by those holding up schools as models of disorganization and chaos filled with child molesters and do-nothings.  No doubt, American education has been at a crossroads, a critical juncture that may well determine the future of the nation.  However, there is good happening on our school campuses.  And there are excellent teachers doing the job and living the life in the face of almost constant criticism and negativity.

One of those good teachers is Rafe Esquith, winner of the National Medal of the Arts and the Kennedy Center/Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teacher Award among other honors.  Even Queen Elizabeth has taken notice, making Esquith a Member of the British Empire.  Quite a trophy shelf for a teacher from Hobart Elementary School in Los Angeles.  The story of Esquith’s work with the Hobart Shakespeareans is a positive beacon of light in a very dark period in American education.  For thirty years, he has taught everything from situational base running in the great American game of baseball to, of course, Shakespeare.  His day begins at 5 AM and goes nonstop until 9:15 PM when he drops into bed.  He teaches on Saturdays and plans lessons on Sundays.  He takes kids on trips during breaks to Washington D.C. and Ashland, Oregon for the annual Shakespeare Festival.  During the summer months, he brings in kids to study Shakespeare and prepare for the next year’s show, if he can bribe the janitors to unlock the door.  This is how he creatively works around the ever-falling budget ax.

Esquith is an excellent, all-around teacher, but what he is known for is the Hobart Shakespeareans.  Every year, his ten year old students produce a Shakespeare extravaganza that includes music, dance, and the plays themselves.  This teacher is a force of nature.  His latest book, Real Talk For Real Teachers (Viking, 2013) is subtitled, “Advice for Teachers from Rookies to Veterans:  ‘No Retreat, No Surrender!’”  The sheer scope of his commitment and the long hours he puts in may scare off some rookies and force veterans into retirement, but then they were probably not real teachers anyway.  For the real deals, he will motivate and inspire; for those who have never set foot in a classroom after their own graduations and think teaching is an easy gig with summers off, you will be in for a ride.

Esquith is brutally honest about his job.  Fatigue is always a factor, and failure is always lurking outside the door waiting to come in on the heels of a troubled student or a difficult parent.  Kids will disappoint, Esquith makes clear.  Parents will scream and berate, and there are times when colleagues and administrators discourage, complicate and frustrate.  All part of the game.  Esquith gives some solid tips to handle these cases and so much more.

What Esquith doesn’t like is almost as interesting as his advice on how to cope.  He knocks President Obama’s Race to the Top program, saying education isn’t a race.  “The journey is everything,” he writes, “and every voyage should balance adventure with rest.”  Teachers who follow Esquith’s schedule will not find any rest, but I take this to mean that students’ education must be balanced between academics and play.  Later, in his daily schedule, Esquith shows us the time he devotes to recreation with his students outside, teaching them teamwork, athletic skills, and a graceful competitive spirit.  He gets in some good digs about overemphasis on standardized test scores and the latest boondoggle, Common Core Standards.  At a training session, the presenter tells the audience of teachers, including Esquith, that their job as educators is “to prepare the children to be a part of the international workforce.”

To those well-intentioned business leaders and production specialists who think they know the secret to improving education, he says back off.  It is not as simple as a good teacher equaling good outcomes for students.  “The family situation of every student, both emotionally and financially, is the primary influence on a child’s success or failure in school,” he writes.  Teachers teach children, not curriculum.  “Standards may be the same for all ninth graders,” he says, but not all ninth graders are the same.”  Therefore, he makes clear that a good teacher must know his subject and how to communicate and inspire students.  Esquith writes:  “After a few years of finding one’s style and rhythm, good teachers begin to spend more time locked in on the audience rather than on the assignments.”

Much of what Esquith excels at is discipline.  He is disciplined and focused himself, and he expects nothing less from his students.  Without discipline, one cannot be effective as a teacher or a student.  He takes remarkable risks traveling with students in this age of frivolous legal action, and he spends a lot of time in the book explaining how he teaches discipline to his kids.  He places the problem within the framework of a permissive society.  “We have created situations where children do not understand that actions have consequences,” he writes.  School districts are too eager to please and to keep all stakeholders happy.  “In doing so,” Esquith writes, “they hurt the very children they are supposed to be helping.”  Before his Hobart Shakespeareans begin rehearsal or hit the road for an off campus adventure, they know that actions have consequences.

Do the students ever act up and cause trouble?  Yes, and these stories often include the teacher’s embarrassment, but Esquith analyzes the incidents turning them into learning experiences for the reader, often by showing where he, himself, went wrong.  This is all part of his classroom motto (and title of his first book):  “There are no shortcuts.”  Esquith says “It’s a reminder to students that nothing comes easily.  Mastering a skill or achieving a difficult goal takes thousands of hours…in a fast-food society, good things take time.”

I would be remiss if I did not point out some shortcomings in the book.  What works for one teacher is not universally good for all, and although Esquith never says his methods are a panacea, teachers who read this book need to recognize their own uniqueness requires his ideas to be adapted to their own style and persona.  He throws down a daunting example to follow.  His all-teacher-all-the-time approach may be unrealistic for those of us who, you know, need some sleep once in a while, and Esquith makes clear that rest is necessary.  Of course, some people need more than others, and that is important to remember.  Some teachers may even find his program discouraging to attempt to emulate.  He has had thirty years of trial and error to perfect his game, a game best suited to his temperament, his school, his classroom, and most of all, his students.

To combat burnout, he suggests, “Every year you teach, add one new activity to your class.”  For some teachers, this might be a recipe to maximize fatigue.  My philosophy has always been “Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.”  Sometimes, less really is more.  Again, it is up to the individual teacher.  If one is bored, or feels the teaching has become stale, then by all means shake things up and add something new.  One has to be careful, though, not to push too hard.  No student is better served by a teacher in the hospital with exhaustion.

I also found fault with the content of some of the teaching and activity he describes.  My first concern is with intellectual maturity.  Are children in fourth or fifth grade ready for Shakespeare?  It’s great that they can learn the lines and their meanings and perform for an audience, but there are a number of grade level texts that speak to their age and life experiences.  Shakespeare is high school level.  Pity the poor teacher who comes after Esquith and must teach the play he has already done.  Every teacher brings a new facet to a previously read work, but the kids don’t see it that way.  They see it as “been there, done that.”  This could set up some issues for teachers down the line, and I’ve seen that happen repeatedly in my twenty-six years in the classroom.  I am torn about what Esquith advocates here; I do think educators need to reach higher, and challenge students to do the same.  Still, it is a delicate balance between reaching and over-reaching.

Shakespeare often includes themes and ideas that although readable by a ten-year old student, may not be comprehendible.  Even his comedies base their humor often on racy material.  He mentions doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has some sexual elements to it.  I’ve taught the play in the eighth grade without difficulty, but I’m wondering, truly, what a fourth grader might make of its confused lovers and sexual overtones.  Esquith also mentions using the Prince song, “Cream,” in a production.  “It’s particularly raunchy,” he writes, but he feels it is perfect for the themes of Measure for Measure.  I would be hesitant to have young children performing this song.

Rafe Esquith is a truly remarkable teacher.  His advice should be welcomed by teachers across the country as well as by parents.  Inspiration and creativity are crucial components of a healthy classroom.  Esquith shows the reader how it’s done.  He dares teachers to dream and to reach and to come to their classrooms with fire and passion.  His students remember what they learn in Room 56, using those lessons to strive for success in their future endeavors.  This alone is a testament to Rafe Esquith’s abilities as an educator.  As he shows us in this book, there is so much more waiting out there for the teacher who dares to dream, and for their students who are inspired to come along for the ride.

Ophelia In Winter

I have spent some time in the last weeks rereading Hamlet, and that brings me around to contemplating Ophelia again. To me, she is one of the most captivating characters in English literature. Why? Because she is caught in the mechanizations that are not of her own creation. Because she is a lost soul who can find no other way to fight back in her world but to sink into madness. Because, in the end, Hamlet loves her, and the result is tragedy of the deepest kind.

I love literary critic Elaine Showalter’s essay, “Representing Ophelia: Woman, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” if only because she gets it right when she writes about Ophelia that she brings forward “the issues in an ongoing theoretical debate about the cultural links between femininity, female sexuality, insanity, and representation.” Ophelia suffers in the play, caught in the pedantic spying of her father, Polonius, the treacherous actions of Claudius, the savvy escapism of Gertrude, and Hamlet’s focus on revenge for his father’s murder. Meanwhile, here she is, simply in love, and thinking that love is all that is necessary to live a rich life. Instead, she gets pushed away by Hamlet, who publicly tells her she is a whore and to “get thee to a nunnery.”

Showalter tells us that “She appears in only five of the play’s twenty scenes; the pre-play course of her love story with Hamlet is known only by a few ambiguous flashbacks. Her tragedy is subordinated in the play; unlike Hamlet, she does not struggle with moral choices or alternatives.” I would posit her scenes are by far the most harrowing. Upon the dissolution of their relationship, Ophelia longs to give Hamlet some “remembrances” that he gave her once, and he coldly refuses them with the line, “I never gave you aught.” Their back and forth leads Hamlet to rage: “Get thee to a nunn’ry, why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?”

He is as much as calling her a whore, and this from a prince. It is a harsh slap in the face for Ophelia, crushing her. There are many theories about their relationship—how far it went, what should have been the future, and what promises were made. Kenneth Branagh, in his film of the play (1996), makes it clear in brief flashbacks that Ophelia and Hamlet were intimate, which means that his public rejection of her would be tantamount to saying she was not a virgin or was damaged goods. In any case, when Hamlet rejects her and then kills her father, she descends into real madness played against the feigned craziness of her former lover.

We later see Ophelia when she “enters, distracted,” into a room with the queen after her father’s murder. She is out of her head, singing and parading around. When questioned, she says, “Quoth she, ‘Before you tumbled me, you promis’d me to wed.’” Later, she encounters her brother, Laertes, returned to Denmark upon hearing of his father’s killing. He cannot believe his eyes when Ophelia enters handing out symbolic flowers to each person in the room. She has no way to fight back against society; she cannot dispute Hamlet’s rejection of her, and she cannot avenge her father’s death, so she must resort to symbolic acts like handing flowers to characters that represent their personalities and actions: fennel for flattery; columbines for ingratitude; rue for sorrow and repentance.

And then she is gone, and the much better manipulator, Gertrude, gets in the final epitaph: “There is a willow grows askaunt the brook, that shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream, therewith fantastic garlands did she make of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples…When down her weedy trophies and herself fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, and mermaid-like awhile they bore her up, which time she chaunted snatches of old lauds, as one incapable of her own distress…Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death.”

Like a crippled mermaid, she goes down singing, wreathed in flowers to a watery tomb. Sad, indeed, but Hamlet learns from her death. He comes to understand the impermanence of life, the fragility of existence, and that he must seize the day and his own destiny. He comes upon the grave diggers preparing Ophelia’s tomb after her death now labeled a suicide, and he has an epiphany. He tells his best friend Horatio: “To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander…Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beerbarrel? Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away. O that that earth which kept the world in awe should patch a wall t’ expel the winter’s flaw!” In the end, we turn to dust and our essence returns to the earth, as Adam was formed from the same earth in Genesis.

Upon the conclusion of the scene in the cemetery, Hamlet leaps forth to declare himself, and says “I lov’d Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum.” Better late than never, Hamlet.

So it is in the dead of winter, I am thinking of Ophelia. Is she a victim of love, a casualty of life and the innocent belief that things will work out in the end? Life is, as Darwin told us, a matter of survival of the fittest. Gertrude knows how to play the game, the role a woman should embrace, wrong as it is. Ophelia, who takes the world as she finds it, goes down to a watery death.

I believe we are all a little like Ophelia. We dream of a better world, and trust that all we have to do to get there is to love. Often, we are crushed when we cannot reach high enough, or travel far enough to find this better world, if the better world ever existed in the first place. Deep into winter, we wait for the spring, hoping that this year will be our year, that love will be enough, and that faced with the fathoms of water beneath our fragile lives, that we will float on just a little longer until someone, anyone, will reach out and save us.

Shakespeare

Shakespeare: The Illustrated and Updated Edition
By Bill Bryson
HarperCollins; $29.99, cloth
ISBN 978-0-06-196532-6

Let’s face it, we do not have much documentary evidence of William Shakespeare’s life, and where evidence fails us, legend takes hold.

Bill Bryson discusses what we know, what we speculate, and what has been misconstrued in his updated edition of the great writer’s biography, Shakespeare: The Illustrated and Updated Edition. The book itself is a work of art, with heavy paper and loads of drawings, illustrations, and a significant bibliography. Still, the ground Bryson tills has been planted and harvested before, yet one gets the feeling that this is an up-to-the-minute biography, and Bryson himself admits in the preface that “For somebody who has been dead for nearly four hundred years, William Shakespeare remains awfully active.” He refers, of course, to the endless reams of scholarship and investigation published each year about the man, the myth and the legend.

Bryson sets off with the three revisions discovered since the volume was first published. The first is Shakespeare’s likeness, a subject of much speculation over the years. Everyone has seen the folio engraving of him, but Bryson reveals that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon has given us a definitive portrait of Shakespeare, and it is not the one we know. This image is known as the Cobbe portrait because for many years it has been displayed in the Cobbe family’s ancestral home.

The other two noteworthy events are the discovery of the foundation of “London’s first purpose-built theatre on the site of a disused warehouse in Shoreditch” dating from 1576 and the recovery of yet another folio of plays stolen from the Durham University library.

Bryson takes us through Shakespeare’s life and times. The biography is well-researched, and covers the major points of interest. What really wins the day, however, are the illustrations. Bryson draws from a plethora of sources, and the art definitely enhances the history, and makes purchasing the book worth the rather steep cover price.

The book is a good overview of Shakespeare’s life. Certainly there are other more scholarly and detailed approaches, but this is a good place to begin a study of his works and history. The book’s value is really more decorative than studious, as other writers have delved more deeply into a critical analysis of the plays and sonnets. I would use this volume as an illustrated teaching tool. Bryson also does a good job of updating what we know with the latest ideas about Shakespeare’s life and times.

It is amazing to me that someone who wrote almost a half of millennium ago could still be read in classrooms across the world today. And the performances of Shakespeare’s work continue, in almost every language and on every continent. Part of my class study of Romeo and Juliet includes a recitation of the balcony scene in Armenian. I even remember a line in one of the Star Trek films that extols the virtue of Shakespeare’s words in Klingon, demonstrating that in a science fiction future, Shakespeare’s plays would spread to other planets throughout the galaxy. One can only hope this will come true some day. Until then, Shakespeare remains an enigma as well as a box office draw. And that makes him a truly remarkable artist.

A Day In The Life of a Shakespeare Workshop

There was a point where I was looking forward to this workshop on Shakespeare. How could it be anything but good? It was produced jointly by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. and UCLA. That pedigree alone assured me that this workshop would be different. It would not be like all the other workshops I have attended in the past, where teaching theories and time-wasting methodologies were advocated by people who never seemed to have spent much time in an actual high school classroom. But alas, I was wrong.

The Folger Shakespeare Library was founded in 1932 and contains the most artifacts, notes, books and papers regarding the writer and his time outside of Stratford in England. The library is named for Henry Clay Folger, whom everyone thinks is part of the coffee family, but instead is a cousin who made his fortune in the burgeoning oil industry of the turn of the century. The facility is funded by the Folger estate, and managed by Amherst College.

Every year, the staff and affiliated scholars of the library produce workshops for teachers and students across the country. This year, the sites included Tulsa, Oklahoma, New York, and here in Los Angeles at UCLA. Tulsa and New York were included in a grant that paid all teacher-participants a stipend; UCLA was not included in the grant, so participants here had to pay for the workshop: $300. According to the Folger website, this fee would include three books, materials, and lunch. Later, the exact number of books and the free lunch were removed from the site.

Upon arrival Monday morning at UCLA, I discovered some uncomfortable facts. One, it costs eight dollars per day to park on campus. Add forty dollars to the cost of the week. Luckily, my school picked up the $300 tab; gas, parking and meals would come from my pocket. Two, UCLA summer session began the same day, so crowds and traffic were horrendous.

The representative from the library told us in his opening remarks that the workshop would focus on three things: scholarship, performance, and pedagogy. My problem with the workshop began with the emphasis on performance over comprehension of Shakespeare’s words.

From the start, the five presenters each took responsibility for sections of the workshop. The two professors from UCLA, Rob Watson and Stephen Dickey, would focus on scholarship and pedagogy. Caleen Sinnette Jennings from American University and Joe Olivieri an Associate Professor of Acting, would stress the performance. I was not sure what Michael LoMonico from the Folger Library would handle. He seemed to adopt a shotgun, disorganized approach, throwing in a bit of everything without rhyme, reason, or at times, even coherence.

Watson opened the workshop by discussing Shakespeare’s life and times. The problem was that he presented material that could be gleaned from any of the numerous books about Shakespeare that have been published in recent years. To an English teacher on summer break, staying home and reading books is a no-brainer, and vastly preferred to traveling to UCLA to sit in a gum-encrusted, hot, stuffy, filthy classroom to hear the same information one could find in his own library at home.

Dickey’s workshop was simply annoying. We read and reread the same passage in Romeo and Juliet, focusing on where to put the pauses in the lines. It was all about the syllables and iambic pentameter, not about meaning, background, and insight. I realize that Shakespeare’s use of poetic forms in a play is unique and interesting, but it is not our first stop in the high school classroom. We first focus on understanding his words. Dickey’s presentation seemed to be going in circles around a minor point.

LoMonico, during his presentation, actually handed us a packet of notes that listed his random thoughts about the teaching of Shakespeare. Number one on the list: “It is more important to get kids to like Shakespeare than it is to get them to understand every word.”

LoMonico kept emphasizing the need for students to perform Shakespeare. Understanding was not important; looking up words in a dictionary was discouraged; even pronouncing the characters’ names was relegated to the students’ best guesses. We were told not to correct them as this might make kids reluctant to contribute to the class for fear of being wrong. He also recommended in some cases not having students read the entire play. He characterized Julius Caesar as “a bunch of guys standing around talking about what they are going to do before Caesar is murdered, and after his death, the play becomes a bunch of guys standing around talking about what they did.” Arguably, much would be missed in this play if one only read until Caesar’s murder, as LoMonico suggested. It is a talky play, but it also contains some of the most quoted lines in all of Shakespeare’s work. Mark Antony’s speech on the capitol steps is a remarkable piece of oration on its own. Coming from an official of the Folger Library this suggestion to stop short of reading all of the play was appalling.

Often, the thread of connection between the disparate lectures was nonexistent. The sessions were filled with infantile games and participation exercises, like hurling Shakespearean insults at one another. If we tell students not to look up the words, how would they understand the insults?

The emphasis on performance over understanding made me feel like Shakespeare was being “dummied down” for us. If the words have no meaning, or at least no meaning we are interested in finding, then why could we not just substitute guttural sounds? Why worry about plot, or meaning, or anything? We could turn Midsummer Night’s Dream into a collage of high school students grunting. Many times, at the end of a session, I was left with the feeling that the whole thing could have been done more economically. Too much time was wasted.

Performance does not necessarily lead to understanding if the actor does not examine each line, word by word, and try to ascertain the point the writer is making. There is a reason why most actors consider Shakespeare the pinnacle of acting. One cannot do a close reading of a scene for meaning and act out the lines at the same time. Most productions begin with a table reading so that the actors fully understand their parts before the director begins blocking out the performance. Successful acting and learning begin with understanding the text. There is no other way to work with Shakespeare.

Many of these exercises simply played to the narcissism of the workshop participants, allowing some to brag that they had read all of Shakespeare’s work, or to demonstrate some ham-fisted, awkward, self-conscious acting. Some detailed their hobbies, which had little to do with Shakespeare or teaching. It did not help that LoMonico ended every session with a cutesy finish-the-sentence exercise, like “In this workshop, I learned blank.” We went around the room filling in the blank. The few who could not finish the sentence were returned to repeatedly for their responses, leading to some embarrassed grimaces and uncomfortable silences.

A consistent problem in this workshop was the lack of interaction and dialogue between presenters and participants The presenters spent their time extolling the value of involved learning, that the lecture, teacher-driven method was old school and not nearly dynamic enough for the new paradigm of student performance and involvement, yet their presentations left little room for questioning on the part of the participants. No questions, no dialogue, no discussion. We were forced to our feet and put through some elementary acting exercises in the name of Shakespeare. Meanwhile, the larger mysteries of the text went unexplored. I wanted to slow down a bit, sink into the discussion, and find the nuances.

What passed for nuances was LoMonico reading the same passages over and over again with the participants, placing the stresses on different words, discussing how this might change the meaning of the line, instead of honing in on what the line actually did mean. His annoying habit of becoming peeved at questions and inadvertently insulting people from New Jersey also grated on my nerves.

It is getting harder and harder to motivate students to read something as difficult as a Shakespearean drama. It takes work to learn. What happened to that most American of work ethics: hard work leads to hard won success. Learning is sometimes, many times, a difficult process fraught with false paths and failures. One must persevere. A sense of accomplishment comes from completing a task that is difficult. Therein lies the reward.

Instead, in this workshop, we were asked to cater to the lowest common denominator in our classrooms: the reluctant, barely literate reader. If we expect students to achieve, or even to pass the state’s own exit exam, where is the demanding curriculum, where are the challenging standards we set for ourselves and our students, and the insistence on understanding and mastering difficult works of literature? Certainly, none of this was on display in this workshop.

Michael Silverblatt, a local radio host of the program Bookworm, wrote in an essay entitled, “Why You Never Learned To Read,” that schools at the turn of the nineteenth century once used a reader that had students reading Byron, Coleridge, Cervantes, Dickens and Emerson in fifth grade. Such challenging material is barely covered in a high school honors or AP course today. “If the teacher read you a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in third grade,” Silverblatt writes, “and then you struggled to read it out loud with the rest of the class in fourth grade, and you read the complete play in seventh grade—you would have the incredible experience of discovering that the mind comes to terms with its own incomprehension. The clearing of the fog of incomprehension is the yardstick of growth, every kind of growth: emotional, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, human growth.”

That is the key. Students must be challenged. They must be encouraged, persuaded, and even required to follow their developing intellects down the road to learning. The path leads through dictionaries, discussions, questions, answers, and eventually, to understanding. This is the path that contains no shortcuts, no easy outs, and all the rewards. In this workshop I learned that this is the path we are not following, but should.

Tuesday, and for the rest of the workshop, my seat would be empty.