This week is the end of the first quarter, and also marks the end of our study of our first (!) major work of the year, Shakespeare’s Scottish Play. It’s been slow going, to say the least. I’ve never been able to figure out why a play that takes no more than three hours to perform has to take weeks to read, and as much as I’d like to be able to say that this year’s sophomores have made the study of the play so much slower than usual, I can’t.

It’s me. I know it.

I was torn, as I am every year, between treating the play as a script and going full-on with acting, and treating it like a piece of literature and going for analysis. In the end, neither approach won out. We read the play, watched excerpts from a couple of film versions, acted some scenes, and made some things. Below are a couple of examples from Monday’s wrap-up activity, which was to make underground fliers calling for revolution against Macbeth, incorporating quotes from the text and design elements reminiscent of 80s hardcore fliers and 90s ‘zines.

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Today’s attempt at presenting memorized scenes didn’t exactly work–memorization is really hard, and the students were overwhelmed.  Chalking it up to poor timing and a difficult assignment, I took the Understanding Teacher Guy route and gave them today to rehearse (with my help, as I bounced around the room listening, quizzing, giving suggestions, waving a fake sword around) with the understanding that tomorrow’s the last day of the quarter and I need to get my grades in.  I’m either going to be really impressed or really disappointed tomorrow.