To the editor:
We are now in full summer mode here in Shanghai. It is hot, humid, and verdant. The past week has been nothing but soft gentle rain and lots of it. Now it seems like all the trees are trying to outdo each other with their growth. All this exertion of course is adding only more moisture to the scene. Humidity is nothing more than plant sweat. Yuck!
I have come to the end of my second semester here at Shanghai Normal University. Semesters are about 18 weeks long. When I started my classes in March I had intended to have my students work with a full text of some sort. One issue that bedevils the English training programs here in China is the minimal requirements for reading, writing, and speaking the language. The same was true when I was taking French classes in PIHS. While my students have had training in English it is a haphazard affair at times. It was with some trepidation that I proposed having my students take on the complexity of a full-length Shakespeare play.
Students were given a play at the beginning of the semester. I picked the play at random. Shakespeare is nice in that he writes for many, many characters. Usually a cast has around 30 people in it. I purposely gave them vague instructions about how they were to perform it. The main rules were to learn the play, learn their characters and be ready to present it in a performance in front of an audience they did not know. Much like the plays of Pioneer Playhouse and The Shipmates playhouse.
I tried to fill in the blanks about the history of the language, customs, and terms that the Bard uses. With 20,000-plus base words in his plays, it is possible that one could learn most of the English vocabulary with a couple of years spent reading the tomes. I left the students to figure out how to do the play. No budget, outdoors, and in front of strangers. A tall order. Now I know the feelings that went through stomachs of Ladner, Smith, Lord, and Zubrick, as they put on their performances.
I am looking forward to a surprise. This is what really makes a teacher thrill. The challenge of watching as discoveries are made. We truly are mad scientists. Using the everyday collection of this and that, we throw it into a pot and hope that our experiment does not blow the roof off the laboratory. We know it takes time and patience but when the experiment works …
In watching some of their final rehearsals: Excitement! My students are realizing that they can do this task. They can do it and have a lot of fun. What they do not yet know is how much they have learned in the few short weeks they have taken to wrestle with Willy and his plays. Right now it is a case of caterpillars in the stomach. Hopefully they grow into butterflies on a wonderful summer day.
Orpheus Allison
Shanghai, China
orpheusallison@mac.com
