Shakespeare for Eighth Graders

In 2000, I approached my supervisor, Dr. Alice Hunter, inquiring about Shakespeare for middle school. She perked up, always a bad sign. She asked me to research plays whose content was not offensive for young readers.  That’s how I discovered As You Like It. Dr. Hunter challenged me to form a drama unit around the play for my seventh graders. A daunting task but I was up for it. I worked for a supervisor who encouraged courageous risk taking and did not punish failures, she only asked us to reflect, reimagine, and try again. The educator I became and continue to evolve into has its roots in this atmosphere.

I felt up to the task because the very first unit I ever created was a Shakespeare unit. I was teaching ninth graders at West Philadelphia High School in the Community Development Charter. It was the 1993-1994 school year. Charter schools in that era did not mean what they do now. A charter school was a “school within a school” that was designed to have a unifying focus. Ours was about citizenship building for the West Philadelphia Community in the city of Philadelphia.

West Philadelphia High School, where I student taught.

West Philly High was the nickname for the structure that house my students, a formidable 1911 brick structure that was three stories tall and covered the length and breadth of a full city block. Our school was often in the news for headline grabbers like shootings, arson, fights, and crimes. I did not share this reputation with my parents, who had taken pains to build a sheltered childhood in the suburbs of New England and Central New York for the five of us Logan kids.

Sayre Middle School where it all began in 1993.

The seventh grade  kids I taught that week were not sheltered. During my practicum in October, five of us teamed together to plan a thematic unit around Halloween for seventh graders at one of West Philly’s feeder schools, Sayre Middle School. That week I had to walk around an active murder crime scene one block from the building. My students encountered it too.

“Mr. Logan, I saw a dead body today,” an obviously shaken seventh grade boy told me. My heart broke a little for him and yet I was simultaneously tinged with the irony that the day before, he was the student who explained the hip hop vernacular of “busting a cap in yo a@#” the day before.

By the time I returned to UPENN’s campus for evening grad classes, I learned that the corpse had been on the sidewalk, outlined in chalk, with not even a cover or sheet over it, since 4:30 that morning after a drug deal went wrong. My students and I encountered the scene nearly four hours later. I wondered aloud in English Pedagogy class that evening if they would leave a crime scene active like that in Baldwinsville, NY or Chesapeake, VA or East Long Meadow, MA where I had grown up.

Not only were my students exposed to things on a regular basis that I had heretofore only experienced in episodes of Law and Order or crime movies, all but three of my ninth graders (there were 35 on my roster for one class) had failed to pass the city’s literacy test. This qualified the bulk of my students for Chapter One funding. It was these kids I was electing to teach The Merchant of Venice.

My supervising teacher thought I was crazy for attempting it but she supported my ambition nonetheless. Many of my students were deacons and other youth leaders in the churches in West Philadelphia. I come from church folks: my brother is a bishop, my aunt was a pastor and my paternal grandfather founded the Zanesville Church of God in Zanesville, OH, where my first cousin is currently the pastor. 

I knew about the culture of church and black church specifically. I knew that these students were not illiterate, not even close, they couldn’t be. Youths in churches were often tapped to run entire church services on teen take over Sundays, students read the King James Version of the bible from the pulpit to hyper critical and vocal “Sister Uhm-Hums.” There was no way they would show up unprepared and tripping on words. These students bombed the literacy tests on purpose because they saw no point in them and no benefit to showing what they knew.

I knew that if they could read King James fluently, Shakespeare would be a relief, and so I set out to prove it to Mrs. Merrill, my students, my supervisor and other colleagues/classmates who doubted my sanity in this attempt. After drama workshops, acting, studying, conversing, testing and studying, my students had an opportunity to go to Temple University and watch the play on stage live. It was a school-hour matinee and students from all over the region had taken field trips to see this production. 

My students walked out of the theater proud of themselves, heads erect, and giddy. The kids from Central High (one of the magnet schools in Philadelphia at the time) were chastised by their teachers for asking my students what was so funny. The “smart kids” didn’t "get" the play, but my kids did. Priceless.

With that “win” under my belt I knew I could do this: teach Shakespeare to middle schoolers. That self-knowledge did not solve my biggest issue however: how?

My students have heard me say it, but I did not create the saying: “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.” I went overboard with my preparation. I read the script a full year in advance of teaching the play for the first time. That was not enough, I understood what I was reading but I was trained by Kim McMullen at Kenyon College. I not only read the sidenotes and longer notes, I read two other treatises about the play, one of them by a favorite scholar: Harold Bloom. I read a book of Shakespeare’s Quotations and focused upon quotes from the play.

I wanted to arm my students with as much prior knowledge about Shakespeare’s times, conventions, writing technique, and customs as possible. I did not want to lecture. I remembered that the “Dummy” series was written on an 8^th grade reading level, so I went to Barnes and Noble, purchased a copy of  Shakespeare for Dummies, read it with pen in hand and dissected the chapters that applied to the script and created a series of discussion questions to check for understanding.

To reinforce what we read, I purchased a copy of a 1932 movie adaptation. My formula for success? Prep the kids like crazy, make them act, make them read the sidenotes, show them how to have fun and keep them accountable. There were hiccups along the way but it worked.

Fifteen years later, I am teaching two plays: Twelfth Night and As You Like It.  This is my last year teaching As You Like It since we have adopted Twelfth Night, but before the curricular shift, two students already had been commissioned to bring a scene from As You Like It to life for a performance before their academic team. Therefore students in those classes are studying that play.

Already, only two weeks into the play, students are reveling in the bard’s irreverence, bawdy humor, laughing with each other as they stumble to read and act out Shakespeare prose and poetry. I have not heard as much laughter, nor seen so many smiles all year. It is a giddiness nurtured by a sense we are getting away with something because the bawdy wit is delicious to eighth graders who, by definition, are naturally inclined to sophomoric humor.

 Shakespeare is a great way to end the year. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.