Chapter 1: Magic carpet “Time Travel” to an Elizabethan classroom

Same book, new title! We’re moving ahead with Routledge Publishing and I’ll soon have more information about the publication date for my book. It will be published as “Lessons for Today From Shakespeare’s Classroom: Empowering Learning Through Drama and Rhetoric.” (We felt that the two previous working titles, “Good Behavior and Audacity” and “A Generation of Genius” were catchy but didn’t sufficiently hint at the content.)

Chapter 6: Timeline for “The Hatch and Brood of Time: A Brief History of the English Reformation”

In the meantime I want to share some of the drawings that my multi-talented, and infinitely generous brother has done for the cover and chapter headings. This first one is for the first chapter: “Time Travel, Setting the Scene,” in which we go back to look at Elizabethan classrooms, which always featured a space, called the “auditorium,” for students to recite/perform their daily lessons. The second represents a timeline for a chapter called “The Hatch and Brood of Time: A Brief History of the English Reformation,” which puts our brief history lesson into context.

Chapter 9: :Per Quam Figuram.” Juggling figures.

Chapter 10: “Erasmus Writes Colloquies”

“Lessons for Today” focuses on two strands of Elizabethan education, both of which require performance: the recitation of memorized lessons from classical literature (formal Latin) and the performance of comical Erasmian playlets called “colloquies” (informal, conversational Latin). Formal Latin required a working knowledge of over 130 rhetorical figures, tropes, and schemes, while informal Latin required a working knowledge of conversational Latin, the lingua franca of educated tradesmen and travelers in Europe.

These are just a sampling. There are plenty more to share. I’m so grateful to John for the fun we had coming up with the whimsical ideas for these sketches. They totally reflect the friendly and approachable tone of the book.

Sam Bardwell of Upstart Crow

I truly believe that all drama teachers who work with children and adolescents are going to heaven. I was one myself and I’ve been privileged to know dozens of them and to have seen the work of still more. I haven’t yet met one who couldn’t claim to have saved a life or redirected a young person away from a bitter or perilous path.

Meet Sam Bardwell, the founder of Upstart Crow in St. Paul, Minnesota.

With a name like Bard-well one would think he was born to perform Shakespeare with dexterity, and indeed he does. But he isn’t satisfied with acting roles: he wants to share his love of performing Shakespeare with others. He has worked with inmates in prison, with seminary students, and for the past seven summers he has held three-week programs, one for children and one for adolescents, outdoors, in city parks. The children work with monologues and short scenes, and the teenagers perform entire plays.

I was drawn to know more about him because I am also a Bard-lover from the midwest, and I know how Shakespeare’s poetry can spark color into that world. In fact, interviewing him, I found much in common between him and my dad, who produced the entire canon of Shakespeare’s plays in Ohio, in the 50s. They both  discovered their love Shakespeare on their own, as lonely, searching adolescents.

Titania and Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

When speaking of how Shakespeare’s poetry resonates with teenagers, Sam quoted from Macbeth: “How full of scorpions is my mind.” I spent many years teaching, and I’ve always scoffed at the phrase “troubled” or “at risk” when applied to an individual teen, because I have never met one who was not troubled or at risk! The adolescent mind is often full of scorpions. It’s just a very troubling and risky time for youth. But poetry speaks to teenagers, connects to to their joys and fears, and heals. Teens are young enough to respond without barriers to artful language of all kinds, and, indeed, are ever inventing artful language of their own. As Sam says, “they invent it because they need it!” But the poetry of Shakespeare’s plays is especially compelling. Sam attributes this to “the liveliness of speech,” “the fresh minted language,” and “how the speech moves through your body.” I couldn’t agree more. Iambic pentameter is the heartbeat.

To quote Sam speaking of Shakespearean poetry: “It is a language with the powerful potential to wound or to ennoble.” “Shakespeare’s gift is to sense the water that we’re swimming in.” The language is full of “binary explosions of meaning.” It constantly evokes “the beautiful ‘ahas!'”

Taking their bow!

Sam’s process with students is to get them to do the detective work for every character, to figure out all of the who’s, what’s, when’s, where’s, and, especially why’s. His method is “somewhat like Stanislavsky’s.” The actor explores each character’s point of view, need, circumstance, and obstacle and then plays with the language until it best expresses what they find.

When you think about it, this is a vital approach to teaching young folks in just about any subject you can name. I’ve heard it called “the isomorphic match,” which is a term for when two patterns match. It is when the content being taught exactly matches the receptivity, the point of view, and the need of the learner. To me it speaks to my belief that every lesson should involve some form of presentation, and that the arts are at the best way to teach everything.

So, here’s to music teachers, dance teachers, visual arts teachers, and, especially, drama teachers!

“My conviction is that education must be about thinking—not training a set of specific skills”

I need to gush a bit about this book! It is wise and witty, and it says much of what I say in my book, but from a completely different angle. My book is from the point of view of a practitioner who has spent many years teaching children and adolescents, so it’s very hands-on, with an emphasis on the formative role of drama, dance, and music in the Elizabethan classroom. Newstok looks at thinking from a much more theoretical and academic perspective, and he does it with delightful charm, humor, and insight. I’ve already read it three times, partly because it is dense with information, but mostly because it is fun. And of course it helps that his opinions, like mine, forcefully counter the prevailing gobblety-gook of current educational theory.

Actually, this may be the first of two or three posts because Newstok covers a lot of territory in fourteen brief chapters focusing on fourteen areas of cognition. This post will look at the first three: “Of Thinking,” “Of Ends,” and “Of Craft.”

What, he asks, are the ends of education? In Shakespeare’s day it was the training of capable and critical citizens  able to function “for the benefit of the commonwealth.” Today it seems to  be test scores. He tells a poignant story about his seven-year-old daughter who, upon being asked if she had learned any new words at school responded, coldly, in a whisper, “Assessment!” He goes on to say, “The reflexive call for educational ‘targets’ in current jargon makes me feel as if we adults have become like William Tell, cruelly aiming arrows at our own children. Our means (passing the test) have overtaken our ends (human flourishing).”  That is to say that if you take the long view of current trends in education, we are, in fact, participating in child abuse.

Here is Newstok on thinking:

“Thinking like Shakespeare untangles a host of today’s confused—let’s be blunt: just plain wrong—educational binaries. We now act as if work precludes play; imitation impedes creativity; tradition stifles autonomy; constraint limits innovation; discipline somehow contradicts freedom; engagement with what is past and foreign occludes what is present and native.

“Shakespeare’s era delighted in exposing these purported dilemmas as false: play emerges through work, creativity through imitation, autonomy through tradition, innovation through constraints, freedom through discipline. I stand with the contrarian view that to be a political progressive, one needs to be an educational conservative. Preserving the seeds of time enriches the present—call this heirloom education.”

And more:

“I’m not against testing as a way for teachers to gauge progress within the domain of their own classrooms. But our fixation on tests as target, as the end of education itself—that shoots an arrow right through the heart of thinking, for when the measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure.” 

And a final quote, there’s that nasty fact about the cost of testing real, substantive, intrinsic, and individualized achievement:  “Rather than measure what matters, assessment measures what’s easy to measure.”

The chapter “Of Craft” I would compare to the current theory of practice devoted to developing “habits of mind.” One develops craft through practice. There are practices, or habits, that value critical thinking, creativity, exploration, reflection, and collaboration. I want to highlight one example, for what should be obvious reasons. Newstok highlights “the scope of collective practices that suffused skilled labor in Shakespeare’s world, where craft was not merely a mechanical process, but also communal, intellectual, physical, emotional. Craft required discipline, enforced by people as well as the object itself. Its practitioners habituated themselves to ever-evolving patterns. While playmaking was never formalized as a recognized London guild, key features of the theater aligned with craft’s dynamic thinking practices.”

My take on much of the above, from my book: “Maybe I’m a bit like Erasmus. I like old ideas.” We have so much we can learn from Elizabethan pedagogy. Strip away the fact that it was only for propertied boys, that it could not be accessed without fluency in Latin, and that it was  excessively punitive (I would argue that one, but not here), and there is a wealth of knowledge about how to train better makers and thinkers.