Students Can Read Anything: The Romeo and Juliet Anecdote

This is part 3 of my project on teaching students to actually read.  The first post in this series was "The Problem," posted on 9/1/12.  So while I'm being held up by the ridiculous logistics of starting the year, I'm itching to get some more ideas out there.  This is just an anecdote, but it's relating one of the first times I can remember thinking about the problems with reading instruction specifically.
 

             I think I started to get the idea that students can read anything in my first year of teaching.  I was teaching 8^th grade in a small 7-12 school in the Bronx and the high school teachers said that they’d really like it if students knew some Shakespeare when they got to 9^th grade.  Wow, ok.  My classroom management wasn’t great.  My lesson plans were shaky at best.  My sleep was lacking.  The reading levels of my students, which I had assiduously measured and documented, were low.  But I went along with it, picking out Romeo and Juliet as the most obvious choice for the angst-ridden crowd in front of me. 

            To make a long story short, I taught the text.  We skipped a few scenes for time, watched clips from Zeffirelli and all of Baz Luhrmann’s films.  We acted a lot.  It took forever and students didn’t understand everything.  I came up with a speech that they really seemed to buy though.  I pointed out that, while reading, we sometimes don’t know what’s going on exactly, but we muscle through and then we get to something we do understand.  Part of the process of reading is stringing together these moments of clarity, making meaning that way.  When we reread the text at a later time, we’ll get more from it, but only because we had this initial reading in our young lives as a background.  You don’t get everything at first.  But you get something.  Reading Shakespeare, I joked honesty, is sometimes like being Tarzan – you grab a vine and swing on it, secure that you know it’s there but unsure of everything around you.  Grasping out wildly in front of you, suddenly another branch pops into your hand and you’re off swinging even further. 

Students seemed amazed by my willingness to admit that I didn’t always understand everything the first time (I was taking a class on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit around the same time and was more than happy to admit my initial impotence with regard to that text), but they also seemed empowered by the idea that they could read anything and that it was ok if they didn’t understand every word. 

Here’s the kicker though.  Once that strict demand for absolute understanding was removed, kids actually managed to understand quite a bit – most of the text, in many cases.  Of course, we went slowly and we had to piece together a lot of passages.  We needed dictionaries and Shakespearean glossaries.  And at first, honestly, I gave a lot of answers out.  But students learned to do it themselves, and by Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, students were happily reading along and getting the gist of things, concluding at the end that this guy was completely out of his mind because they didn't know what he was talking about and they suspected that it might be the point.  Students were well aware that there were things they were missing – some even looking forward to seeing what they would get out of the play next time they read it – but they certainly got more out of the experience than they would have if I’d given them a cheapened version. 

         It’s only an anecdote.  I wasn’t using the annotation method that I’m looking at here.  I was just trying to give students the idea that they can read difficult texts, despite what our culture of reading levels might suggest.  It wasn't perfect and certainly there were things that I would do differently now.  But it was a start.