Yearning: Shakespeare and the Rest of Us

Tomorrow, I will teach my high school students Sonnet 18, which is perhaps the most famous of William Shakespeare's intricate love poems. As I was preparing the lesson this afternoon, I was struck by how Shakespeare's words call out across cultures and centuries to our own hearts. This happened when I listened to this reading of the sonnet by David Tenant, the Scottish actor best known in this house as the tenth embodiment of Dr. Who. 

A Morning with Shakepeare's Rude Mechanicals

Today is one of those days when I am so grateful we live in the small town that we do and for the people God has put in front of my family. This morning, 11 children who call themselves the Rude Mechanicals sat around a girlfriend's kitchen table, reading Shakespeare's comedy "Much Ado About Nothing." My friend Mary guided them through about two-thirds of the play, as the boys and girls read out loud.

This went on for three hours amid laughter, and teasing and general good fun. There was a break for apples and orange slices and a quick-moving game of charades in the family room. Our son L. was asked to be part of the fun. I was in the family room the whole time, sitting and knitting and drinking tea with another mom.

Redemption: The Thane of Cawdor, Ivan Ilyich and the Rest of Us

This fall I've been teaching Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth to high school juniors. And this week I finished reading Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In both stories, writers describe men at the end of their earthly lives, men guilty of serious sins and yet who find redemption at the very end of their days.

The possibility of redemption: I can think of no more compelling message this Advent season, a season in which we Christians await the birth of our Redeemer.

Yes, Even Shakespeare Sometimes Had the Blues

The other day a student expressed surprise after reading William Shakespeare's melancholy Sonnet 29. "Shakespeare wrote this? Why would he feel this way?' 

Sometimes, when I teach teens literature, I forget to communicate that the long-gone writers whose words fill literature textbooks were human beings. But how could they be otherwise? How could Shakespeare have expressed so richly in his writings the depths of human joy and sorrow if he did not himself experience delight and desire and despair?

The Test of Literature: Field Notes

"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it." 

-Elizabeth Drew

As my first year as a high school teacher ends, I find myself in a reflective mood. At the start of the year, I had hoped that when my students met William Shakespeare and William Golding, Homer and Harper Lee, they might consider the proposition that writers have bits of beauty and wisdom to offer us. I still have that hope.

Nearly all my students are reluctant readers. Many of them would rather play a video game or shop at the mall than pick up a book. The challenge for me is to find a way to connect the required literature with their endlessly online, teenaged, suburban lives.