Happy Birthday, Shakespeare. What You Mean to Me.

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Today the Bard is 448 years old. This universal author touches so many: he's global and he's omnipresent because he's also quite local and personal. So let's set the GPS for me with the typical narcissism we love as bloggers. What does the Bard mean to me? It's still a pretty nice birthday tribute to tell another how he's changed your life, so I'm sure Will wouldn't mind a fan 400 years hence bowing to his wisdom, his beauty, and his wit.

I have already written my thanks directly to Will and why I need him, and I have already defended his honor, nay, his very existence. Today, just some simple, quick thoughts of how Shakespeare is part of my daily bread and daily pages.

1. Poetic language that transports the teen heart. I fell in love with Shakespeare in 11th grade when Macbeth taught me what "all is lost" meant. Is there any better speech than "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow..." (The entire text shimmers at the end of this post.) I knew then that Shakespeare got me. He got depression, he got ennui, he got hopelessness. 
2. Words, words, words. I have so many great words thanks to the man who made them common parlance. Dauntless, besmirched, and lackluster are just a few. This delightful Youtube video, a must-see for high school students, dedicates Chapter 3 (found at 2:19) to the Bard's impact. His words, read aloud many times in my own schooling and later in my classrooms, inform my writing today with diction, musicality, and emphasis. I think of his consonance, alliteration, euphony, cacophony, internal rhyme, and meter, and I hear me trying to imitate it in my own work while sounding 2012. 
3. Kid inspiration. The other day, I'm standing in line for a burrito, and a young man in scrubs said, "Excuse me, did you ever teach at Stanford?" I told him yes once I figured out he meant the middle school, not the university. I could not place him. "I'm Adam," he said. "I played Mercutio?" Then I remembered. One can only cast an adventurous, humorous soul for that role, and suddenly I saw the 13 year-old I hadn't seen since 1998.  I told him I was happy he had survived that production of Romeo and Juliet, because I recall it involving a) seventh graders  b) no budget and c) not enough time to master the Bard's work. But because of intrepid and enthusiastic kids, a persistent if naive director, and some awesome parent support, the thing came off. And Adam made his mark. Now he takes care of patients and plays music. And yet he still remembered being Mercutio. "My one claim to acting fame," he joked. Thanks, Will, for helping me make an impact on some youth on a dusty stage with poor lighting yet burning still with your incandescence. 

Shakespeare, a book of your complete plays would suffice for a desert island exile. On my worst days there, I'd still find great speeches with more left to mine, and I'd call up great memories with your stories in my classroom. And I would find great words to help me write my story in the sand. 

Writing Prompts:

• What has the Bard done for you lately? Or once upon a time?
• Write about to-morrow, about life's petty pace, and your fears of dusty death.
• Find one of Shakespeare's sonnets and let its lines inspire a new work from you.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
 Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
 To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. 
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

-- excerpted from the MIT full text. Act V, scene v

Thoughts on Seeing Dr. King's Memorial

He was part of a Movement of hundreds of years long, yet we must always build a Monument to one Man. I wonder what Dr. King would have said about that.

He was a writer.

He was not a drum major but a peacemaker, preacher, and pavement pounder. He was an organizer and a thinker and a dreamer.

As he wrote so well: "...let us see that we all have the drum major instinct. We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade."

If you don't think this speech is for you, read it and think about your car shopping and your response to advertising. Read it and think about your children. Read it and think about yourself. King's words could have been written on the verge of our recent economic collapse.

I like that in this country, we can edit monuments.

Writing Prompts:

• What do you believe needs a monument today? What person, movement, place, or thing deserves recognition? Whom or what do you admire most? What will be the inscription?
• What has too many monuments in our society and needs less attention?
• Read about the development of the monument--the origins of the idea, the fundraising, the design, the building--and ask yourself what you have learned about monument making in America. You can use sites such as the history as found at the Memorial website and at this Telegraph article. Do more research till you get the full picture, and ask yourself what is "American."
• Should the Dr. King Memorial be edited? Other monuments have been. How accurate must monuments be? How much are they about ideas rather than facts?
• Read Dr. King's speech, "The Drum Major Instinct," and write a letter to yourself about where in your life you could be less "all about me."
• Read the inscription on the monument (as created in 2011) and discuss why its excerpting is inappropriate or appropriate, just or unjust. What difference does the original context make? Should the visual and spatial concerns of the architect and sculptor matter? Should the spirit of the man who spoke the words matter more?
• Read Dr. King's speech and write a letter to a leader or other public figure who could use a dose of the message. Keep Dr. King in mind as you craft your words and tone. Advise this person who influences so many as to how he or she might be a better role model. 

Hold Up, Hold UP: Don't Mess with Huck

"The fault lies with the teaching, not the book. You can't say 'I'll change Dickens so it is compatible with my teaching method'. Twain's books are not just literary documents but historical documents, and that word is totemic because it encodes all of the violence of slavery. The point of the book is that Huckleberry Finn starts out racist in a racist society, and stops being racist and leaves that society. These changes mean the book ceases to show the moral development of his character. They have no merit and are misleading to readers. The whole point of literature is to expose us to different ideas and different eras, and they won't always be nice and benign. It's dumbing down."
-- Dr Sarah Churchwell

This week everybody's weighed in on whether NewSouth Books should have edited the n word out of Huck Finn, so I'll add to the cacophony by hailing Dr. Churchwell's brilliant first statement and plumbing a topic that gets lost in this debate. How do we teach difficult texts?

I write and coordinate independent study curriculum at the Duke University Talent Identification program, where I and course developer Sandra Sinclair grappled with this Huck Finn question when we created The Reader's Journey, Volume 1. Note what we say to students as they embark on reading the novel:

Sometimes when we read literary works from another era, we may find the language to be archaic, biased, or strong. We may even be offended by the diction and the attitudes it represents because the language reminds us of horrible injustices and past crimes. Such language may cause problems for modern readers who don't comprehend the setting of another era or who would rather not explore the prejudices and problems of that time. In other words, reading a work from such an era can be contentious.

For example, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written in the late 1800s by Mark Twain, takes place in the Southern United States. Some of its language is considered racially inappropriate and offensive today. While we would never consider using such terms today, Americans from certain regions of the country once did, and that language is key to the setting Twain establishes in his story.

Let's get a sense of how you will be challenged. You have to imagine a time that is drastically different from your present-day experience, and yet, familiar in some ways. Huck Finn is set in 1835-1845, when African-Americans are enslaved in parts of the United States, and the country has not yet fought the Civil War—a war fought over slavery and other economic, political, and social concerns.

Try to picture a time in America when race relations were so bad that it would be commonplace for a white man to claim how wrong it was for a black man to be educated, wealthy, and have a vote.

If you would like to see how we ask students to investigate a particular racist rant by Pap, Huck's father, begin on page 14 of this sample lesson.

These words are only a snapshot of myriad ways I've introduced and taught works with antiquated, offensive language. I've started with slide shows of civil rights history so students can see how long and hard people fought for freedoms in the United States, so that the work being studied--in this case To Kill a Mockingbird, rife with the n word--could be placed in a positive, progressive context. When I say "progressive," I mean inspirational to any student whose ancestors may have fought for basic rights.

An aside: If students only read works where people of certain races, religions, ethnicities, and sexual orientations are always enslaved, oppressed, or secondary characters, we're giving kids a narrow, myopic lens on diversity and achievements. In other words, Jim of Huck Finn and Tom of To Kill a Mockingbird shouldn't be the only black men teens encounter in English class. I'm all for Huck Finn mixed in with contemporary works.

Someone might argue that I, who am against censorship, have censored myself in this post. Of course I have. I am a white American woman born in 1968 who refuses to use the n word. Place me in my historical context, get to know me a little, and you'll soon learn why I have no desire nor right to use that word casually. If I write about a character who happens to be racist or happens to be black, it's possible I'll include the entire word spelled out in that context. But only then.

It's also helpful to present students with that civil rights timeline but first as just a series of dates, no events, and ask them where their births, their parents', and their grandparents' fall. It's interesting to see their faces after you post historical events, when they begin to see who in their family was alive when Jim Crow was still around, when lynchings were still the regular, when Dr. King was assassinated. Suddenly racism isn't the mere stuff of dusty history tomes. Suddenly it's harder to argue that racism is dead and that the n word is everyone's to use...especially harder for those who don't realize they're waking up white.

My students have learned the art of argumentation while debating whether works such as Heart of Darkness should be removed from the canon. My students have written private journals about racial epithets and other violent words they have used or others have used against them. There are so many creative, compassionate, and courageous ways to teach the ugly truths of human history and the malignant desires of the human heart.

Millie Davis of the National Council of Teachers of English, which calls the NewSouth edition censorship, notes this is not a book you read aloud. I would agree, having discussed with my students how we will skip this word when reading sections of Heart of Darkness in class. No matter how racially heterogeneous your classroom is, it just doesn't make sense to let those words fall on student ears. Maybe someday, the word will be so innocuous that anyone can say it the same way they might say "knave" or "varlet" when reading Shakespeare.

By the time students are 12 or 13, they should be led thoughtfully and sensitively through these dark topics by both parents and professionals. School is a place to practice habits of good character. As Churchwell says, let's not interfere with the study of Huck's moral development by cleaning up the rough, ignorant, historically real language Twain gives him.

No, I won't pretend my heart doesn't beat faster before I embark on such lessons, or that I haven't pulled students aside and asked them to let me know if they feel like things are too disturbing. Teaching tough works is messy. You have to be ready for a range of feelings to be expressed by everyone in the community. You have to listen. And what Mark Twain's Huck, Jim, Pap, and others have to say--in all their splendid ignorance, with all their courage, and with all their beauty and warts--is worth giving a gander to. Or, we can all follow Huck's example in Chapter 1, before the adventures have schooled him the wiser, and hide our heads from history.

...but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people.

Writing Prompts: Please note that writing prompts should always be pursued in emotionally-safe environments with the supervision of someone who interested in encouraging good writing, self-awareness, and reflection. A wonderful resource is Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others.

© Lyn Hawks. Writing prompts for one-time classroom use only and not for publication in any form elsewhere without permission of this author.

Writing Prompts for Teachers

-- What books won't you teach? Why?
-- What types of topics are your students ready to handle? How do you know?
-- How do you prepare your students for difficult topics and words?

Writing Prompts for Students

-- What words have you or others close to you been called that are extremely hurtful? What do those words mean to you? How do they affect your feelings and your actions? What choices did you make after hearing these words? Why?
-- What words have you called others that you now regret? Why?
-- Should literature we read in school contain those words? Why or why not?
-- Should literature with such words be banned from the canon? Why or why not?
-- Should literature with such words be edited so that synonyms are used? If yes, what synonyms would you use, and why? If not, why not use synonyms?