Day 7 Thinking About Shakespeare

I just completed my syllabus and companion class web site revisions. Generally speaking, my purpose in teaching Shakespeare is to excite students to the point of madness and obsession. I mean this. I love Shakespeare (almost every play), and strive to give students a theatrical setting in which to read five plays produced in 1599. I focus on Shakespeare the playwright, the man with a 10 percent share in a theater venue and company, a man with dollars to raise and seats to fill. That's why we read the plays out loud. But because we read in class (and I don't lecture, I provide running commentary) some students do not read before class. They come to class and wing it. As a result, I restructured my syllabus to emphasize the homework reading assignments and prepared Socratic questions for a 10 minute random start to every session. Then I developed study guides for each play and assigned a 2-page paper based on any question in the guide. All of the new material has the Intellectual Standards at the core.

As for the challenge Artez set for me, which is to contemplate the Intellectual Standards, the new material clarified my thinking, made expectations more precise and will deepened the student's engagement with the plays. I mean I can lead a horse to water...

The Intellectual Trait I practiced today was perseverance. As a follow up to my op-ed piece in the New York Times, I appeared in Capital Public Radio's program "Insight" along with Stockton Symphony's Maestro peter Jaffe and Spoken Word Diva Tama Brisbane, founder and director of With Our Words, to talk about the arts in Stockton. Though our city is bankrupt, we focused on the positive and made a collective commitment to continue to advocate for and to nurture the arts regardless of the financial setbacks we are facing.

Capital Public Radio Segment on the Arts in Stockton after Bankruptcy