Othello

I am watching a student's head this morning.

The classroom echoes hollowly with the tripping syllables of ninth graders reading various parts of Othello aloud to one another, one at at a time. We are two days into a three-week taste of Shakespeare, and already I am sensing that it will be a challenge for first period, especially.

The students of Period One are well-mannered and docile, charmingly supportive of one another and compliant in even the most tedious of homework assignments. They have the highest grade average of all of my classes, and usually I am incredibly pleased with them. Our class frequently ends with an expression of thanks, on my part, for the twenty or so students that have begun the day on such a cordial note. I like this class. I am grateful for this class.

Still, this is not the class that will love Othello, or any piece of literature pulled from the centuries-old canon, dusted off, and sold to high schoolers as important. I've already given them the speech, revealed the secrets of education that they will be expected to know once they graduate. "You'll be at these parties, folks, in fifteen years, and someone will say something about Shakespeare and they'll expect YOU to be able to have a conversation about it! What are you going to say?" They shrug.

"What kind of parties have people talking about Shakespeare?" mumbles a skeptic.

"Not the kind I'm going to, that's for sure," grumbles a second.

My promises of cultural literacy are lost on them, these sleepy first students of the day, for whom dreams of being executives and actresses require too much imagination, too early in the morning. Nor are they impressed, overall, with the story in comparison to the amount of work it takes to understand it through the mists of 16th century English.

So, as a few brave students wade through Act I, Scene 3, I'm closely watching one student, trying to trace the progress of one of my biggest Shakespeare critics. At first he holds the book lightly, as if it is filthy and he is afraid to touch too much of it with his hands. He rests his elbows on the table, propping the pages barely open with his thumbs. I can't imagine how he can see any of the words. Irritated sighs occasionally flutter the pages in front of him.

After a few lines, he slumps over the top of the desk, straightening his arms until his hands and wrists dangle, palm up, off the front of his desk. His head attracts the most interest: he has placed his face--nose, eyes, and mouth--between the still-open pages of the book. I stare at my student incredulously for a moment, until I remember that the teacher stare only works if the students can still see me. This one is clearly hiding.

"Hey," I whisper. "Wake up." He's only a few feet from me, and I can hear his words through the barrier of pages:

"I AM awake," he grumbles. "I'm reading."

* * *

I love teaching Shakespeare plays to this group of students, to new teenagers in the city, even though the first time they open the books, littered with notes and unpleasant syntax, they look up at me with expressions of betrayal and bewilderment, as if I'd just handed out Camus in the original French. "Don't worry!" I crow. "It'll be hard at first but it'll get easier soon! Stick with it."

I can remember feeling that lost. I recall reading Shakespeare on buses and checking notes every other line, trying desperately to make sense of the thick blank verse, or lying on the top bunk of a dorm room and spending hours on just a few pages of Milton criticism. I hear Chaucer's Middle English, as a professor read "Canterbury Tales" aloud to us in the evenings of a study abroad trip, and we struggled to keep awake. Struggled to find our way out of the thickets of confusion created by too-old language on too-young ears.

But I also know, because I have been lost before, the deep satisfaction and sense of genius that comes when we finally begin to understand. Every year, I am surprised by the students who show up every day during these difficult sections of the class, ready to roll up their sleeves and work incredibly hard at decoding this story that they never imagined they would be able to read. I feel like a revolutionary, initiating these young people into a discussion that has been unfairly dominated by academia for hundreds of years. I'll never forget the college professor who, when asked why she had never taught secondary school, shuddered and said, "I don't even know if high schoolers can learn literature." I was horrified, and perhaps I have been working ever since to prove her wrong.

Because they learn it. Today I taught Othello using Lego men and a photograph of Venice. I drew a map of the Mediterranean and traced the movements of Venetian and Turkish fleets. Students pointed to one another to explain the complicated web of lies and love that makes this story brilliant and difficult. It is not theory or criticism, not restricted to theme or technique or characterization. There are days that I long to retreat, away from the noise and apathy and discipline, back to school, to get a degree that earns me the right to teach motivated students in a quiet college classroom somewhere. But these days are filled with reasons to read Shakespeare and Lego men and boys falling asleep with books on their faces and kids who will grow up feeling they can learn anything. And I'm glad, once again, that I'm still here.