I know, I know – you’re all waiting for an update on Finn the Cat and Bruce’s latest rant on Chatham drivers. Sorry to disappoint but just to keep you up-to-date, Finn is alive and well, and despite trying to eat and climb our Christmas tree, he is actually starting to mellow a tiny bit. He is biting less and cuddling more, so we are cautiously optimistic.
I have a rant I’d like to share and I’m curious how many parents of teens out there might agree with me.
I have a daughter in Grade 10, and as most of us have since the dawn of time, she is forced to study plays by William Shakespeare. And the latest is Romeo and Juliet, the most depressing Shakespearean play of them all, in my opinion. And they are studying it in excruciating detail.
Don’t get me wrong – writing by Shakespeare is a classic for a reason, but like Latin, it has become a dead language. There are very few people who can read Shakespeare without a translation page right beside it, as Olde English is not a language a teen would recognize, except for a few phrases that have translated into modern English.
The depth they expect teens to go into in this tragedy is, to me, a waste of good learning time for modern English, spelling and books that might actually engage them. Sure, study some Shakespeare and go over what his plays did for our language today, and its impact on society, but to have to memorize who said what and when in a play – what a waste of time and brain energy.
The curriculum for English classes, to me, needs to join the 21st century, and actually let teens read something that was written after 1960 (cough, cough Fahrenheit 451 – really?) and is not a tragedy or a depressing dystopian tale of woe.
There are so many brilliant, well-written modern classics (which in this context is written after 1950) that would be more engaging for students. Save the in-depth, scene-by-scene analysis of Shakespeare for students studying literature and the arts. Or (gasp) let them pick from modern classics, with teacher approval of course.
Yes, modern classics tend to be more controversial, but if we can subject our teens to a story of a girl choosing the time, place and boy to lose her virginity to, and then of the pair committing suicide because they can’t be together, then we can let them read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, or perhaps Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
Shakespeare did not write in Olde [sic] English, or even in Middle English. It is modern English. Some of the phraseology has become less common, but that is part of reason that students study Shakespeare’s work. The plays are meant to be seen in live performance, but nobody I know needs a translation. The Bard is still unsurpassed in blank verse poetry and could frame insults like no other English language writer before or since. Mary Beth Corcoran “jests at scars that never felt a wound”.