“Acted Ere They May Be Scanned”
Before spring break, on April 11, we published the following instructional posts:
You could have read both over the break to prepare for the next unit. That was not the assignment, but it’s important to note that you had both posts with more than ten days to read them.
On April 12, we published the work you’d be doing on the day you came back from break:
Again, this was not required over spring break. It is, however, important to note the ten days during which you could have done this reading. You also have (and have had for a long while) a preview of every day’s lesson and every assignment’s deadline:
That’s a screenshot of your course calendar, specifically the two weeks right after spring break and through the end of the first GAP panel of Q4. We repost it whenever we make changes, so you’ve also seen this calendar in your Google Classroom stream a few times as we adjust upcoming units.
What ought to stand out there in that screenshot: We gave you two days entirely for reading the summaries of Macbeth, organizing your resources for Macbeth, and preparing to watch — as you might expect — Macbeth.
We also gave you Friday, April 26, as a kind of intermission between halves of the play. Originally, that was to accommodate the field trip to Six Flags, which most of you signed up to attend. When the field trip was postponed, we kept this “intermission” to give you another day to read summaries, revisit resources, and so on.
All of this prep was built around writing a reader’s response, which is an essay only possible when you’ve invested in the reading. Macbeth is a great story, and as the instructional overview tells you, we’re interested in how it affects you and what insight you have into its story, not plot-based quizzes and tests.
“The Labor We Delight in Physics Pain”
Which brings us to the lecture.
Leaving aside the ten days of spring break, you’ve had more than a week to become familiar with Macbeth. You’ve had summaries and time to read them in class; you’ve watched a performance of the play; that performance was broken up so that you had plenty of time in class or at home to address confusion, review the summaries, etc.; and there is a post that contains every resource and tool you might need.
Your only other assignment was to write about the end of the year and the need to focus. That assignment was, therefore, set up to help you study Macbeth. It was a means of transitioning out of spring break and into the final two months of school.
While you watched Macbeth, we did two things: We responded directly to those Q4 plans, and we took notes on your attentiveness to the play. That gave us a mostly complete picture of your readiness to do the reader-response work attached to Macbeth.
To help you to see part of that picture yourself, here is a quiz, presented as all quizzes in a makerspace are:
Write down as much detail about Macbeth as you can. What happens? What are the major conflicts? How do the main characters develop? How does the story end? What are some of the obvious themes?
Again, you’ve had a week to read any of a half-dozen summaries; to watch a performance of the play; and to use various resources to translate, review, etc., any confusing elements of what you’re watching. Shakespeare is difficult, of course, but the English of his plays is still English — a different dialect, of course, but English, all the same. And, again, you were told to read those summaries first. You were given an intermission on Friday, April 26, to prepare for the second half of the play.
If you don’t know much detail about the plot of Macbeth, you haven’t done your job. Were you lost? Were you confused? Well, what did you do to fix those issues?
For example, consider Act V, Scene 1. (You can read it translated into modern English here.) This is Lady Macbeth’s “damn spot” scene, which is among the most famous moments in the play. It’s the last time we see Lady Macbeth on stage before she kills herself, and she spends the scene wracked with guilt and horror at what has happened. It’s somehow made worse by the fact that she’s sleepwalking — so consumed by anguish that she can’t escape, even in sleep.
The version of the play we watch zooms in on Lady Macbeth’s face to frame her emotional state. Then she does this:
Yet you laughed.
Here’s the thing: Out of context, that’s actually funny, in that it’s basically a meme. Look at the few comments on that particular upload:
But that’s out of context. Out of context, I’d actively encourage you to turn Lady Macbeth’s scream into a meme. There should be more Shakespeare memes, frankly. In context, as part of our look at the entire play, laughter is an inappropriate response to this scene. Laughter reveals that you aren’t paying attention to the plot, aren’t immersed in the action, and aren’t aware of the stakes.
That’s not soap-boxing, by the way. It’s reality: If you watch this scene while invested in the story, aware of what Lady Macbeth’s words mean, and focused on how the actor embodies her anguish, you won’t laugh. If, however, you aren’t paying much attention, haven’t done the prep work necessary to understand the gravity of the scene, etc., then you would laugh. The scream comes out of nowhere, in that case, because you’re not part of the audience; you’re in the next room, essentially, overhearing what someone else is watching.
So you outed yourselves. This was another test of your discipline and focus. If you don’t want to say that you failed, put it more empathetically: You still struggle to do your job as students.
“King-Becoming Graces”
That’s where we are: You need to do your job as students. That means paying attention to what we’re reading, completing the work you’re assigned, and using the feedback we give you.
In here, hitting those marks will earn a good-to-great grade, because we focus so much on growth, self-awareness, amenability, and so on. That ought to be one motivation. Another is that you have to develop good habits of mind now, before bad habits become permanent. The safety net we’ve given you won’t be there next year. To be frank, it’s not going to be there in June of this year, either. You’ll have another reader-response essay to write, a final exam to take, a Pareto Project to present — assignments that will determine, for some of you, whether or not you pass on to eleventh grade.
Ask us questions about how to refocus and make the most of this work. Remember that it’s not just about catching up with Macbeth now; it’s also about making sure you patch the holes in the hull of a capsized ship.