Legos

My students are playing with toys at the front of the classroom.  


Lego people, to be specific, mostly of the maritime variety.  There are several dressed in the red and white of the British navy, one with an identical uniform in blue (French?), a few pirate-esque gentlemen, two ponytailed ladies and a kid in a tux and baseball cap.  Right now, lunchtime, four or five boys are huddled around the table, posing this motley society a variety of martial (and dubiously sexual) positions.


"OK, you can play with the people," I accede from my desk, where I'm pretty busy with the warm and delicious leftovers from my first ever whole roasted chicken and the Myspace profile that a clever student created for a character from Othello.  "You can play with them, but don't change their hats and weapons around.  That's annoying."


No, I haven't been reassigned to an elementary school mid-year, as amusing as that would be. This is still ninth grade English, and the Lego people are fairly important--if rather quiet--members of our class these days.  They are, you see, the characters of Othello.  There is a Lego Iago (standing out in villainous blue, with forbidding jagged mustache), a Lego Cassio (with glasses and a backpack, as all lieutenants good at math are prone to have), and of course a Lego Othello.  


This title character posed something of a problem to me last year, as a search through Noah's bin of Legos produced only white (actually canary yellow) Lego people, whereas Othello is the most dynamic and powerful African character in all of Shakespeare's works.  After criticizing me roundly for my lack of cultural sensitivity, last year's journalism students took it upon themselves to color my Lego Othello's head and hands with a brown marker.  While that might have been a lateral move, sensitivity-wise, we now have a distinctly African Othello Lego.


My students thought the Lego people were funny the first day, as we began to read out the play aloud and various students bravely waded through the complex blank verse.  I set them up beneath the document camera--these days projecting so much more than documents!--with a black and white photograph of Venice as a backdrop.


"Why do you have these?" they demanded.  "Do you have kids at home?"


"We've been over this.  I don't have any kids."


"Then where did you get them?"


"They're my brother's."


"Your brother?  You took your brother's toys?  That's hella mean."


"My brother is twenty-three.  He'll be fine.  Plus, he has more Legos at home."


Now, a few weeks into the unit, we all accept the toys as a matter of course, a legitimate visual for a complicated book.  We don't start reading a scene until the characters and setting are up there to see.  We've moved on from Venice, and now we look at a castle that is, of course, the fort that Othello & Co. are busy defending in Cyprus.  As characters enter and exit, I set the people on the table or pull them off, tossing them into the blue plastic bowl that serves as backstage.  Students occasionally demand impossible acting from the characters, whose range of motion is admittedly limited, but mostly they glance up once in a while from the tricky syntax, resting their gazes with amusement or consternation on the primary-colored people projected on the screen.


"Why didn't you do this for all of the other books?" some students ask when Period Five begins and we start assigning parts for the day.


"Because the other books weren't full of Italian names that sound the same and written four hundred years ago.  This helps us remember who's there and what's going on.  Now, who's reading Roderigo today?  Short part, and today is his smartest day ever."


"Isn't he the really dumb one?" a student asks.


"He's the guy in the tux with the Dumbledore beard," another responds, pointing to the screen.  "A tux cause he's rich, and a beard cause he's in disguise, right?"


"That's the guy," I respond.


And I love my job.