General Game Plan
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Questions
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Yes or No: No Maybes
To each of the following questions, respond only "yes" or "no." You will decide why and defend your answers during philosophical chairs.
What to Do With the Prereading Questions
Discussion: Philosophical Chairs* Philosophical Chairs is an in-class debate activity in which students take sides on deliberately ambiguous questions. Students begin by individually answering a series of questions agreeing or disagreeing with the deliberately ambiguous questions, but then are put in small groups of about five to six students. There, the entire group must come to an absolute consensus ---- no "majority rules," no "give in because everyone else disagrees." Encourage students to keep fighting for their position and giving explanations and reasons why. The purpose of the group is to sway the other members to consensus. Find Consensus Once groups have come to a consensus -- a process which may take a substantial amount of time, possibly as much as an entire regular-length period -- then students should be directed to go to one side of the room or the other depending on the question. (Using the example above, all students should go to the right side of the room if they agree that the purpose of college is to prepare one for a career and to the left if they disagree.) There are a number of different rules for conducting philosophical chairs that should be explained and put on the board for reference: Philosophical Chairs Rules Students are to keep an open mind and listen to the speaker's statements without rushing to judgment. Students are to divide into Yes/No groups based on their answers to the questions.
Your Role in Philosophical Chairs During this discussion, the teacher should primarily stay out of it except to enforce the rules -- or to call foul on students who aren't moving even after a very persuasive argument has been given. It's going to be hard to keep to the "wait three seconds" and "restate the other person's argument" rules, but those are absolutely crucial. (How many of us just "wait to speak" rather than actually listen to an opposing argument and actually address another person's concerns?) Otherwise, listen for discussion going to the same ground or winding down as a signal to change questions. Reflection and Writing As an option for journals, exit tickets, or casual writing, students may be asked to provide a reflection on the discussion, essentially answering, "What arguments did you hear today from the other side that was persuasive or compelling? Did any argument change or modify your own initial position?" |
Overview
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Overview
Overall, the following information needs to be presented at a minimum, ideally in interspersed lecture and questions. Students should understand the following basic information by the time the background information lecture is over. You can do these in any order.
MORE INFO If you need more information about any of these points listed above, please feel free to use these notes. William Shakespeare was born to a middle-class family in the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. Not much is known about his early life and schooling except through inference and circumstantial evidence, but what we do know is that when he came to London in his youth, he would transform not only English drama, but the English language. Theater The major theater associated with Shakespeare was The Globe, which basically looked like a large toilet paper cylinder on end -- it was open-air, and naturally lit. There were very few formal sets and props, and yes, all of the parts were played by men because it was generally considered licentious or improper for women to perform onstage. (And YES, the Elizabethan audiences were willing to suspend disbelief about male actors playing women, but Shakespeare himself will constantly play with gender throughout his play, as in Twelfth Night, where the heroine, Viola, disguises herself as a man to protect herself in a strange place, and ends up falling in love with Orsino, who is in love with Olivia, who is in love with Viola, whom she thinks is a man. Add Viola's near-identical twin brother Sebastian, and you have yourself a party. Literally, in the character of Viola, you have a man pretending to be a woman who's pretending to be a man who's in love with a man who's in love with a woman who's actually a male actor playing a woman. And so on.) No, Shakespeare Did Not Speak "Old English." Shakespeare's language ranges from the richly allusive and educated to the simple and accessible -- sometimes within the same line, as when Macbeth says that his bloody hands "will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red." His language is rich in nouns especially, concrete language rather than abstract or unrelatable imagery that would not appeal to a wide audience. Instead, it reaches out to all classes, both the "groundlings" (the people who occupied the standing-room-only cheap seats right in front of the stage) to the wealthier patrons in the boxes. What's also a common misconception is the idea that Shakespeare, because he wrote in the late 1500s, somehow wrote "Old English." This is about as true as saying that Shakespeare was an earlier species of human because he lived 400 years ago. being because he lived hundreds of years ago. Shakespeare didn't write in Old English. He didn't write in Middle English. He wrote in MODERN ENGLISH. Yes, he used "thou" and the second-person familiar form of "you" that we no longer use. That's not enough to make it a whole new class of language. ... and Shakespeare Didn't Speak With a British Accent! Blimey! If you choose to do activities with students in which they enact a scene from the play or recite a mono/duo/ensemble scene, some students may (erroneously) adopt a fake British accent, thinking that’s what one is “supposed to” do to a Shakespeare play. Let them know that the accent we associate with the modern British upper-class didn’t really exist until well after Shakespeare’s death, when the Duchess of Devonshire, who had enormous influence on style and trends, decided that this was a far more “proper” way to speak and sound. There is a considerable movement toward developing or restoring original pronunciation to Shakespeare plays in performance in Britain, and the result is an accent that kind’ve sounds like Ireland by way of Kentucky, so…not exactly like Prince William. Check out the fascinating video to your left discussing the efforts of the scholars and actors at the restored Globe Theater to bring back the original pronunciation. What Iambic Pentameter is For Many teachers simply teach that Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter. They almost never explain WHY. If pressed, they sometimes may explain that Shakespeare usually had his noble characters speak in verse and his common characters speak in prose (mostly true), but that's not an answer to the question. Why don't they speak in iambic tetrameter? In dactylic hexameter? Why that? Well, for one, we tend to think of short lines (as in iambic pentameter) as being lilting and singsong. Think of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, which often keeps a (rough) iambic trimeter/tetrameter pattern, for example, or think of a typical folk ballad. It's not that this meter is somehow bad -- it's not -- but the "feel" of a serious speech done in iambic trimeter or tetrameter is seriously undercut by the fact that it sounds like the beat to "Old Dan Tucker." On the other end of the scale, iambic hex- or heptameter just sounds drawn-out and overly long, a quality Alexander Pope mocked in his "Essay on Criticism" in his comments about "A needless Alexandrine ends the Song/That, like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along." In many ways, iambic pentameter is the "Goldilocks meter" of English poetry: not too long, not too short, and just right. Iambic pentameter can also tell an actor something very important: Which WORDS are the important ones to stress? After all, there's a vast difference between saying, "YOU look nice today" versus "You look nice TODAY." Bottom line, the important words in the line are the ones that Shakespeare deliberately puts in a position where they will be stressed by the meter pattern. Now, proceed to the Lear in Film page for act-by-act questions and discussion topics. |