by Dottie Cooper

Created on: November 28, 2008

The moment the name "Shakespeare" is mentioned in a middle school classroom, the responses will run the gamut from "yeah, Romeo and Juliet!" to "who?"

Exposure to Shakespeare has long been a hallmark of a somewhat classical education. Unfortunately, with testing and required standards mastery, many students are being denied the opportunity to run with the literature of Shakespeare. How is time found in the middle school classroom?

At a certain middle school in a certain part of the country, 50 minutes a day is given to academic teams to create programming for students at various levels. This fall, 35 students from that team who did not fall into the category of acceleration or remediation found themselves in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare in and of itself is timeless literature. Using the full version plays with 11 and 12 year old kids can be challenging. So, taking a version of the Shakespeare plays brought down to an 11 or 12 year old level in terms of language and removing of adult situations that don't directly influence the outcome of the play, the students easily engage with the plays.

The Shakespearean adventure begins with a look at monologues from various Shakespeare plays in the old English style. The students select a monologue that interests them and work in groups to rewrite, line by line, the monologue from its old English style to modern English using a high quality dictionary. This helps kids to gain appreciation of where they have come in terms of the evolution of the English language (though it is amusing when they attempt to speak in old English style).

After about a week of translating monologues, groups present to the class-one person reads the old monologue and one person reads the revised monologue. The class critiques the work of the group, indicating whether anything worthwhile was accomplished within the translated version.

The next step involves a student review of the available plays. Each student had to have a parent sign-off on a permission slip which plays were acceptable for that student to perform.

Students are given the book with the youth versions of the Shakespeare plays. They are encouraged to look through them, talk about how many of them were made into movies. For example, "The Lion King" is a smashing parallel to "Hamlet" and the storyline in the movie "She's the Man" is frighteningly close to the storyline in "Twelfth Night". "Romeo and Juliet" is still a favorite and most kids have seen the modern urban movie version of the play.

The

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