I Wanna Come Back. June 12, 2019
Finally, at the age of 73, I’ve decided what I want to do with my life. When I come back to haunt some souls I haven’t quite settled with, I will teach high school again, but with some preferences.
First of all, I would like to be in a big school of about sixteen hundred students. Preferably, it would be in a large urban centre so that the diverse mix of peoples would be a strong feature of both the staff and student populations. The staff mix would be 51% women and the admin, having such a large population in a downtown environment, would be three VPs and 1 principal equally distributed between male and female, with, at times, a few non-binaries. Let’s keep it interesting with progressive collaboration.
All that is structural as the personnel architecture of the place, but is not the pleasure of being with the kids.
What I would really want is to be the Shakespeare guy. Imagine if every class, particularly in the academic stream, were required to do a Shakespeare play? Now, there is no reason that the Applied (not university bound) couldn’t be treated to the bard, as well. No Fear Shakespeare would be banned from all classrooms, and be relegated back to the Swamp of Lethargy from which they came. I refuse to insult my students.
Why Shakespeare? He’s fun. Why did Shakespeare write his plays? To stimulate the soul? To fertilise the intellect? To make a living? I think the last. In his drama, tropes of the human condition, life was spectacle. Eagerly, it sold; so important to commerce was entertainment that the Globe Theatre was burned to the ground in a production of Henry VIII by the firing of a cannon setting the whole building on fire. The poet brought tears and fears, laughter and foolery, shame and guilt. He created consciousness and conscience. The man was grounded in humanity, although he is the best argument for aliens I know.
Some years ago, I went to a very provocative lecture by a Shakespeare guru on Hamlet. At the end in the Q&A, I hopped up and asked, “As a university professor, what do want from high school teachers?”
She answered very simply, “Make them love it, and put it on.” So simple, so true. I hope I succeeded; her words are fondly remembered.
And Will is for life, the gift that keeps on giving. In conversation some years ago with a graduating student, I said, “Karim, all the test scores and brilliant essays you excel in are less important to me than one thing. My test is this, ‘Will you buy a ticket to Hamlet when you are 40?’” I will never know if I passed.
So, my dream job? In the public system, teachers have six classes. Some teachers, as I remember from my fifty year career found their strengths with other texts. I would make an offer: they would teach my class of some fascinating novel or creative writing unit (not my forte) when I would teach their Shakespeare. The timetabling would have to permit it, but in a large school, many overlaps are possible. So, in the morning, for example, I see myself presenting Macbeth’s hallucinations with the witches to the grade 10s, the Duke and Isabel’s proposition scene in Measure for Measure to the grade 12s, and that memorable scene with Caliban hiding from the storm as he is encountered by Trinculo and Stephano to the grade 11s. And then stop for lunch. That would work up a ravenous appetite.
Imagine a group of ‘tech’ kids listening to you reading Romeo and Juliet as you dramatise Juliet’s nurse with a truly fine vibrato in Julia Child’s voice. Imagine reading Coriolanus chastising the mob scene as the students, and making eye contact with the toughest individuals as the Roman ‘rabblement’ while accusing them of their inane fickleness. You’ll recognize success as scorn from their eyes. And then, there are the witches in Macbeth. That isn’t fun?
Furthermore, the heady stuff doesn’t have to be dull.
Here’s an example of the Fool in King Lear on the subject of truth, big truth. Instead of nitpicking and destroying the text with “what-does-this-word-mean, let the poetry speak.
Listen to the Fool to Lear on subject of Truth:
Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out, /When Lady the brach may stand by the fire and stink.
(Truth must be rejected, but the comfortable falsehood—the brach or stinking bitch—will be kept in the comfort of the fire with where the lords and ladies sit)
Then, there’s Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell the lie enough times, people will believe it; and the bigger the lie, the better.” Play them together, make connections across time and space. There is no such thing as off-topic, for associating idea with idea becomes lateral thinking, creative imagination, application, knowledge, all to be found on a Ministry rubric somewhere, you can be sure. That is education, making relationships; it is not a game of Jeopardy. You’re good to go; you can work it into a Ministry document somewhere.
Continuing with the theme of Truth, today we are filled with fake news from WMDs of the Iraq invasion to he the inanities found on Facebook. What did the president in the White House tweet today? The daily news is the best resource to bring Shakespeare into their world instead of dragging them kicking and screaming into Shakespeare’s. His satire is meant for our times, all time. When I return, there is so much more material since 2016.
And if you really want to have some fun with the world issues or politics and history kids, with regards to Lady Brach, just say, “The CIA coup in Chile in 1973 brought democracy to a suffering people.” Want to play with Venezuela? That would put Shakespeare in the Canadian realpolitik. Remember, a few of the older ones might even be voting in the next election.
In the excitement, there won’t be enough time to quell the responses before the bell. And we get paid for this! So easy. I want to come back.
Furthermore, I would like to make amends for the sins of the past upon my return. Now, as a former Catholic, we, to avoid the blasts of the fires of hell, had to make the distinction between sins of omission and sins of commission. I’m sure I’ve committed some few, but I’ll just keep them close to my chest; however, the sins of omission that I recognize I would like to have a run at again.
Keeping that brand of sin in mind, I must preface that preparation of material is the joy of teaching. Seriously, folks it really is satisfying to delve into the finer points of the subject. If we expect our students to experience the pleasures of thought, the joys of the mind in their studying, our preparation of lessons must be the same. Not only that, but every finished product must be part of that process, and is, therefore, the workshop for the next. My teaching the Tempest this year is the promise of a better unit ten years down the road.
Let me give you an example. A grade 10 class project sometime in the early ‘80s was the staging of the Tempest, one of my favourites. As the good professor had said, “Put it on.” Quite apart from anything we had done, years later a Native group mounted a production with its emphasis on the colonisation of the indigenous people by imperialist Europe as in represented by the figure of Caliban. As I reflected on that, I remembered that the student playing Caliban in that class project had been a Native boy. Hmmm! It gave me pause to think. The association was not emphasised in the class project; therefore, we did not make full use of the historical context, for these were the days before the current consciousness was raised to the extent wherein we appreciate diversity and its history today. That I would dearly like to rectify, for with the diversity in the schools currently, there is a rich opportunity that could easily be realised for the students of the present considering the emphasis that Native and multicultural studies have gained. I daresay, it would be apt to cast African students, for example, in the role, not just those from the Americas. Again, this is bringing Shakespeare into their world. “Make them love it.”
I write this less with regret that I won’t be back, rather more with gratitude that I had such good years with wonderful people. I miss it, for it was joy, and joy seasoned carried aloft by Shakespeare. Yes, I would be the Shakespeare guy if I could.