Virtual Reality Shakespeare

Over the years I have taught Shakespeare’s context good, bad and ugly. I have taught it as a lecture or I have made students do an infamous fact search of things to do with his life, theatre and world. Whatever I did, I ended up with some meaningless waffle copied out from a website. Make a factsheet. Dull results. Make a poster. Boring.  Make a quiz based on the facts. Zzzzzz. Some people might read this and think, ‘Well, I do that, and they loved it’. Maybe I don’t have the magic ingredient, but writing about context always seems to involve some kind of ‘question and answer’ task or some form of regurgitating facts found in a book.

Last year, I did something different with a group of Year 7s with Shakespeare. I got the students to write about the experience of going to the theatre as if they were there. None of the boring and mindlessly irrelevant stuff about Shakespeare dying on his birthday. After several years of students telling me this, my response of ‘really’ is wearing thin. So, I got students to write about watching a play. Subsequently, in my trawling through the internet over the holidays I found that I am not alone in this idea. Great minds think alike.  However, the resource on TES was focusing on descriptive writing, whereas I was focusing on contextual knowledge. (Sorry, but can't find it. When I do, I will put a link here.)

Understanding is more important than lots of mindless facts. The facts are important to understanding, but often the overreliance of factual information leads to some codswallop statements when students write. The facts are used to form ideas rather than applied to an idea. Shakespeare left his wife to work in London is used by a student to crowbar the idea that Shakespeare didn’t like women so makes Lady Macbeth a horrible character. Or, some students just throw contextual facts in like salt and pepper; they just end a sentence with, ‘this is because fathers decided who daughters could marry.’ I feel that something more has to be done with this factual knowledge to develop a real understanding of a situation.

Often, the context becomes a list of facts that we feel we need to impart to students before they fully understand something. But, I feel that the facts need more exploration and connection to other factors of the time. The whole chuck a load of things at them and, hopefully, something will stick doesn’t work for me.  Take, for example, this simple fact:

Elizabethans commonly thought that the Devil was capable of taking over your body and any suggestion of devilish behaviour or costume (actors) caused fear in an audience.

In a nutshell, they were scared of the Devil. Some deeper thinking is need for students to understand the implications of that fact.

If they were scared of the Devil, what else were they scared of?

If they believed the Devil was real, then how religious were they?

If they were scared of actors being devilish, how did they react on stage?

If they thought the Devil could take over a body, how did they view their friends and family differently?

If they believed in the Devil, did they think all crimes had something to do with this?

A simple fact alone becomes something more. The exploration of that one contextual fact has lots of resonance in so many different ways.  The questioning of the fact gives us a deeper understanding so that when we apply the questions to a play such as Macbeth, we understand the context better. You understand the world was one of fear. Look at the play and you see a fear of the supernatural, the fear of family and friends, the fear of things not being right.  Then, add another fact such as James I’s interest in witchcraft and you understand the first fact better. If the King is interested, then the rest of the country would be interested by default.  I am teaching ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ to Year 10s and the one fact that I have unpicked is the fear that the white community held at the time: they feared, incorrectly, of black men being unable to control themselves and attacking their women. The questions this leads to are far more effective than a small photocopy of history of racism in America.  

Rather than listing lots of contextual facts, we should be unpicking them bit by bit and developing our understanding further. Then, we can relate them to other aspects or facts. Knowing one fact and its significance is much better than knowing lots of facts and not knowing their significance. But, maybe we need to give more time to unwinding the facts. I am guilty of rushing through things, as I plough through so many aspects in a text; but, maybe, I need to be a little more simple with how I approach context.

Anyway, how did I do the virtual reality Shakespeare? First of all, I had to explain what virtual reality is, as unlike me they weren’t around in the 1990s.

1] First, I started with the facts. Well, true or false statements. Students decided what was true and what was false in the following below. They are silly, but they help to give a sense of the time.  Each statement could become a stimulus for exploring the context further. If they didn’t wee in a bag, where did they wee then?

When going to the theatre, people used to carry a little bag to wee in.

When you sneeze, somebody else must say 'bless you' or the Devil will take over your body.
If you wear pretend horns on your head and said you were the Devil on stage, then people would think you were the Devil.
People used to carry a little bag of flowers to keep away diseases.
The actors used real explosives and fire on a wooden stage.
Women couldn't act on stage.
People couldn't watch the plays at night time.
You were not allowed to throw rotten fruit at the actors.
Actors were only given their lines the day before the performance.

2] Then students compared two pictures. One of a modern theatre and one of the Globe theatre. This provided a point of comparison for discussion. The longer I teach, the more I realise that we need to place more things side by side to draw knowledge from students.

3] At this stage I worked with students on the language of Shakespeare’s plays and we worked through a small scene from ‘Hamlet’. Year 7s seem to love the opening scene to ‘Hamlet’ for some strange reason.

4] By this point, I felt it was necessary to revisit the context, so we watched five minutes of ‘Shakespeare in Love’. Obviously, I made sure it was a suitable bit; and the bit I selected was the bit towards the end, where they perform ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Students jotted down what they would see, hear, feel, smell and taste, based on the clip.

 

5] Now the tricky bit! I had to explain what virtual reality is to students who had never heard of the concept. It surprises me, but they haven’t. In the 1990s, it was all the rage, but now it isn’t.

I then got a student to be blindfolded. He then walked (sorry, nervously stumbled) through the class and if he bumped into a student or went near someone, they had to shout out something they might expect to see.  Now, I would hesitate to do this with an older group as you might get a few interesting answers, but, thankfully, the Year 7s were kind. The student bumped into a hawker, a baker on his day off, a boy that wanted to be an actor, and someone urinating on the floor.

We have so many visual stimuli for Shakespeare’s theatre that I think we need to employ our imaginations a bit more. This did.

6] After all that, I decided to narrow the focus on an object that might be seen in that experience. A handkerchief. A purse. A pie. A dagger.  We then had a go at describing that object and experimenting with word choices and how to fit the object into a sentence.

 Finally, they turn this all into a piece of prose.

Task: Write two sides of A4 paper describing the experience of watching one of Shakespeare’s plays.  Your object must fit into the description somehow.

The final products were the most interesting things I have read about context in years. The writing was engaging and fun, but they proved how much students knew about the theatre of the time. These are some of the scenarios that students described:

·         A teenage boy worried about going on stage.

·         A noble worried that they would be robbed.

·         A thief picking pockets.

·         A man in the audience scared at the sight of the ghost.

·         A woman in the audience worried about the weather.

·         An assassin looking for a target.

All of these descriptions were to the backdrop of ‘Hamlet’, so there were constant references to what was happening on stage mixed in with the perspective chosen. In fact, the students were weaving in the context with the play. A few years later and I will be asking them at GCSE to do this and think about how the audience would react to a scene. Here Year 7s were doing it unprompted and with glee.  Some of the more able students were writing using Elizabethan language and others just lifted lines from the play.

When marking these I could see that students had knowledge of the context, but also they had understanding. And, I think, understanding the context is far more important than the knowledge of it. I still need to work on things. But, from now on a few facts, for me, well understood are better than a paragraph of details that isn’t understood and isn’t related to the text.

Thanks for reading,

Xris

P.S. Please read my other blog about context for more ideas about teaching context here.

P.S. I love Gove.

I promise you I haven’t gone mad, but today I am going to be positive about Michael Gove. Yep, you heard me right: positive about the man whose photograph occupies various dartboards across the country in homes and schools. The reason for this surprising burst of positivity is that I feel that somebody needs to play devil’s advocate or provide a counterpoint to the arguments that judge him and his ideas. Most of the time they amount: grrr, don’t you hate him; he is so clueless. Twitter alone has enough comments daily that vilify him, yet there are very few voices that agree or support him. There seems to be a mob mentality when it comes to referring to the man. Some people on twitter are a few steps away from pitchforks and flaming torches, and, maybe, a select few are probably working together to hire an assassin to dispose of him.

I too have joined in the mob and blogged about my dissatisfaction at certain things that have happened or are going to happen. I don’t agree with everything he has orchestrated or suggested. There are some things I abhor too, but I think an overview is needed. I do feel for new teachers as the common held though it that this man is destroying education single-handedly. Really? This man is going to ruin education. I think a bit of perspective is needed. Teachers are the eternal optimists. They have to see the good in the bad.   

So, what have the Romans ever done for us? I mean, what has Gove ever done for us?

Raising the status of education

Teachers hold in their hands the success of our country and the wellbeing of its citizens; they are the key to helping every child in this country to realise their full potential.

When I think back to all the previous education ministers or politicians associated with education, I struggle to name them all. In fact, I struggle to name most of them. I only really remember Lord Adonis and Ed Balls because they sounded like a group of male strippers. In the public eye, education minsters have always been low on the political radar. They have been in the public sight once every five or six months, but the rest of the time they have been hidden in the shadows. Not Gove. He is there on a weekly basis, almost, putting across his views and ideas.  Education is mentioned in the press on a weekly basis. It is in the public mind all the time.

How many sixteen and seventeen year olds have heard of Mr Gove? How many parents have heard of Mr Gove? I would say more parents and students know of our minister’s name than before. They know that changes have taken place. They know how they have been affected.  In Parents Evenings’ in my teaching career, I have never mentioned the education minster, yet now parents do. 

For endless years, we have heard about GCSE results continually improving and there had been little or no reaction to that. The naturally assumption people made was that they were getting easier. Was anything done in the past to combat this? No. What did he do? He opened the can of worms. Resits. Inflated marks. Modular testing. He addressed this. Yes, people might not like it, but the way the GCSEs are going they will be tougher and harder. They will represent a challenge and not something perceived at being easy. 

Questions

There is no denying that the man has an agenda: an agenda that most people disagree with. However, he has raised some serious issues about education and how we teach. He may think he has the solution, but in peddling his solution he has raised questions.  Are we academic enough in our teaching? Do we simplify things too much? Are facts more important than skills? Are boring lessons a problem? Are we pandering to what students want rather than what they need? Are some new teaching methods credible? No other minister in my time in education has made me think about the quality and validity of what I do and how I do it. I don’t agree with everything he spouts, but he has made me think about how I teach.

The discussion, for example, about what should be in the curriculum for History and English has raised more questions. He is challenging the status quo. Why do something because it has been done for years? Why shouldn’t we do something else? He has raised questions about how we do things. Each curriculum is about a series of choices and sometime we should question those choices. The most invigorating change for me was the change in AQA anthologies poems. I was secure with the old ones and I had loads of resources. However, the new conflict set of poems sparked my creativity, interest and enthusiasm.  The changes in the English curriculum have also got me excited as I will mention later.

The man has got teachers questioning everything. Look at the arguments on phonics. There have been some intelligent arguments for and against. But, he made us do that. He made us question it and not blindly accept it.
 
PR
Mr Gove used to work in journalism and he knows how papers work. There is no better evidence of this than his press coverage over the last year. That man is never out of the papers. Why? If you think of the public consensus, he is the hardest working politician next to David Cameron. He is always being seen or heard in one way or another. To his boss, he looks like he is working really hard. And, he is building up his profile of being a future PM (which he denies) with his constant drive on ‘change’. The voting public want politicians of action and change. Look at the image he has created over the years. He isn’t someone that sits on his laurels and waits for things to happen; he makes things happen.

Gove is the fox in the hen hutch or the bright student in the class that can with one sentence cause uproar.  He is a ‘soundbite’ man. He will make a point and ruffle everyone’s feathers and see the reactions. Sometimes, this will include changing policy or backing down.  Mention something and step back and see how people react and behave is a classic management move. He is testing the water and judging things when he says things. Therefore, when he says something these days, I tend to take it with a pinch of salt. I leave sharpening the pitchforks for another day.  

Controlled Conditions / Coursework

Nobody told me how much I would come to hate controlled conditions or coursework over the years. It is one of the things I hate about teaching English. For years, I have struggled with jumping from one piece of coursework to another in Year 10 and Year 11. In English, the whole two years seem to be a jumping from one piece to another and then a mad panic for the exams at the end. It always felt as if I was continually teaching to an assessment and not necessarily teaching English.

Added to this, coursework has always been full of problems and issues. Students copying stuff from the internet. The blur between the help at home they might get and the students' own work. The excessive drafting by some teachers.  Inflated grading of work to combat poor exam marks. There never seems to be a fair way of doing it.

Thankfully, it is going. Yes, it will mean that some students will not be able to shine in a way that they did before, but at least we know the whole system will be fair. No longer will we see E grade students suddenly producing B grade work.  Now, I will have two years to prepare students for an exam and along the way I control what they do. I can be creative and I don’t have to be controlled by the rush to get all the assessments done in the time. I can teach English rather than teach to a piece of coursework.

Oh and another thing: I will no longer have to fill in those coversheets and sort out those folders. This task alone took hours of my free time, checking that things were right.  I love Gove alone for saving me this pain. 

Grammar
Grammar has always been a difficult subject in schools. Many teachers were not taught explicit grammar at school and this has been a contentious issue for years. He brought it to the attention of all and put it smack bang in the curriculum. It is now part of the testing in Year 6. Time will tell if the impact of this is successful, but it does mean that more teachers are teaching grammar and more students will have knowledge of how to use it correctly. Who could argue that we need less grammar teaching in schools? We needed more and we needed it to be not the sole responsibility of the English teachers, because they were seen as the 'fix-all-brigade'. 

Equality
I want my students to have the best chance of getting the result they deserve based on their skills and knowledge. Some argue that the new changes at GCSE will penalise some students, but for me I think they will not. They are now going to be marked in isolation and away from the teacher’s subjectivity.  Their work will be marked by a stranger that doesn’t know them and it is all down to what happens in the exam room. In the past, there hasn’t been a totally objective system. You have had generous markers because students have really tried hard or that they are worried that someone will tell them off if they don’t get enough Cs in their a class.

Students will be judged on one thing and one thing alone: how they perform in the exam. We now will have a level playing field. A C will mean a C and not just a poor result in the exam boosted by uncharacteristically high controlled conditions and speaking and listening marks.    

Romantics
Enough said, really. What’s not to like about having the Romantics taught in English?

Conservative
For several years, there has been a tendency for lessons to resemble a children’s television show of quick quizzes with prizes and ‘here’s one I made earlier’. The man, after all, is a Conservative and he will, by default, prefer the traditional approaches and the old ways of teaching. But, he has for one thing, addressed the issue of education over entertainment. Do we as teachers spend too much time entertaining and not enough time educating? The whole furore of the ‘Mr Men-gate’ incident was about the 'alleged' dumbing down, but it was also about the entertainment of the topic, making a subject entertaining or fun.

A child-centred approach to learning is a great thing, but when does it become about entertaining the child and less about educating the child? Maybe, he has something in that we are appealing to the children more, when we should be teaching them in a traditional manner.

 

Finally, if there is one thing he has done, it is unite teachers. Unite them against him.  Change is difficult and it is always hard to deal with. Reports always cite moving house as being one of the most stressful things in life. I want a system that is effective in teaching and sadly it isn’t as effective as it could be. Yes, change is hard and not always enjoyable, but if we want to improve things, then we have to change things.

Now, what has Gove done for us? Well apart from the status, PR, the questions, the coursework,  grammar, equality and a conservative view, what has Gove done for us?  The only person we hate more than Gove is the bleeding Judean People's Front.  And the People’s Front of Judea.

Talk about Judean People’s Front.  What has Labour done for education recently? In fact, who is the shadow minister of education?

Thanks for reading,

Xris32

P.S. I don’t love Gove. It is not even a bromance, but I do feel some good has come out of the bad things. And at least he is in the public eye and in plain view. I always worry about the person that doesn’t say what they mean and isn’t in the public eye.