When I read this Joss Whedon interview on my phone I wanted to keepsake what he said about appreciating Shakespeare. Of course, I mislaid the link and it took me a while to find it again. Thus, here, as a quotation with a link back of course, is what he said:

[Interviewer]I must admit, I am someone who needs to study Shakespeare to understand the dialogue. What is the threshold that one can cross to get a deeper appreciation of the language?

[Joss Whedon] There’s two ways. One is you really pick a play apart and you go over it and you understand all of the references and the intent. Just everything that he’s doing in terms of character, in terms of talking about humanity, in terms of even punning, the rhythms. The more you get into it and learning his basic vocabulary, that’s really useful. However, it pales beyond seeing a good production, because a good production of a play or a good movie of it will give you something that all the study in the world can’t. It will give you the humanity of it. When you access that, the language almost becomes secondary. You can understand it without necessarily understanding what it is exactly is being said. If you understand that the person who’s saying it is really f***ing angry at the other guy and you know why, then you’re in the story. Then gradually the language seeps in.

Source

At school, I'm aiming to follow both ways. In future, I'll have a Joss Whedon film to aid me.

Happy birthday gillo!

And under the cut something just for you.

( Not the fireworks this time! )

The first snow of the winter is always something special, and even more so here, where we don't get much of it anyway, maybe two or three times a year and then only for a couple of hours.

Needless to say, everyone at school was giddy with excitement. Even the Year 13 students were acting like little kids, talking about snowmen and snowball fights and marvelling at the steady fall of big fat snowflakes outside the window. "Miss", one boy told me, "yesterday I just threw myself down in the snow".

They just couldn't concentrate on the balcony scene in Romeo & Juliet, so I made them write about what would have happened if it had been snowing in Verona on those fateful days...

The first scene was re-written as starting with a snowball fight. The ball took place at an ice-skating rink. Romeo tried to impress Juliet with snowy metaphors and in the balcony scene he had to throw a snowball at Juliet's window to get her attention. He also nearly froze to death.

I'm again battling cross rhymes and the dreaded lyrical I.

Sometime I question why our sixth form/high school English courses have to be so much about language analysis. I really enjoy doing Shakespeare and analysing public speeches or newspaper editorials, but what my students really need to learn is to use the English language confidently in an every-day context and in the business world. They go metaphor hunting in their German lessons anyway and while I have to make sure that they recognize the form of the Elizabethan sonnet, I'm not convinced that they're prepared for a telephone conversation in English that goes beyond booking a double room.

I make them do presentations in English, force them to speak English during groupwork (not always successfully) and of course, my classroom is mostly an English-only environment. At the end of the school year, they'll also be able to discuss problems of globalisation and genetic engineering, but I still doubt that this will help them in those situations when they're most likely to encounter English after school.

That said, I have absolutely no ambition of teaching Business English and I'm not qualified for that. I love it when my students passionately debate whether it's important to know who these people in the sonnets were or if it is of no consequence at all. I enjoy their discussions about the characters in the books we read and films we watch and when we talk about the American elections or immigrant life in Britain. Most of them are good at stating their opinions, developing their arguments and providing reasons for what they think. In a roundabout way, I hope that in a future business meeting they will be able to fall back on that and close the deal.

On Friday I was offered a spare ticket to the theatre - someone's misfortune, a broken leg that prevented him from attending the performance, meant that on Sunday night I sat inside the Neuss Globe and got to see some live Shakespeare.

There's just no substitute for seeing a play on stage.

I don't feel qualified to write a full review. Let's just say that there were things about the production that I liked and other aspects that fell slightly flat for me.

I've spent most of the day smearing red ink all over my students' exam papers. For once I managed to keep my hands clean. That's quite funny as the exam text is an excerpt of Act 2, Scene 2 of Macbeth including these lines:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Now wasn't that a sneaky way of doing the Shakespeare meme?


I'm still processing Serenity. I've had some more thoughts about the film and I found a very helpful review that I will use to explain my feelings about the film. I'm not very good at coming up with original ideas, you see, so I need somebody else's words to help me state my opinion. And writing about it helps me see things more clearly. The writer mentions a couple of spoilers, so don't read the whole thing if you wish to remain unspoiled.
I don't wholeheartedly agree with him, but he makes several valid points.

( No spoilers. )