This notice comes from Michael LoMonico, Senior Consultant on National Education at the Folger Shakespeare Library:

I am excited to share some news from Folger Shakespeare Library. In addition to our four-week Teaching Shakespeare Institute, we are taking the show on the road and offering two different week-long Mini-Institutes this summer. We will be at Adairsville, Georgia and the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Both of these will include lectures by scholars, performance classes, and curriculum sessions based on Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In addition to funding from Folger Shakespeare Library, these institutes were made possible by grants and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Georgia Council of teachers of English, and the University of Nebraska.

Dates:

Georgia- June 9-13

Nebraska- June 23-27

If you have not attended a Folger Institute, now is your chance. Full details and application materials can be found at www.folger.edu . The entire application process can be completed electronically. The deadline for applications is May 1.

In the United States, ninth grade is often the year students are introduced to Shakespeare, and the play of choice is Romeo and Juliet. The unit is usually second only to the research paper in terms of difficulty; it’s just so hard to read the English Shakespeare crafted 400 years ago.

I tell my students that reading Shakespeare is like listening to a wonderful song on the radio as you are driving out of range of the station: you can tell it’s a great song, but the static makes it difficult to appreciate the music.

The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project has developed The Interactive Folio for Romeo and Juliet. This wonderful resource really helps break through the static. On the left is Shakespeare’s text, hyperlinked. Click on a link, and to the right you will see support — a paraphrase, an explanation, a picture, audio, or video. Students can read straight through where they feel confident. When they need help, click! It’s there.

While the interactive folio is currently the “star” in my book, don’t stop there. There are links to several projects that bring Shakespeare to 21st-century students of all ethnic backgrounds. Don’t miss the Learning Commons for ready-to-use activities.

Somewhere there is a student who thought she was going to hate Shakespeare. She’ll use this site and think, “Wow, this is cool. Shakespeare is cool!”

Would you like to spend a month this summer studying Shakespeare at the leading U. S. Shakespeare library? Here’s your chance: the Teaching Shakespeare Institute will run July 6-August 2, 2008 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

According to Dr. Robert Young, Director of Education at the Folger:

This four week summer program will focus on four plays- The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear and Richard III. Participants will spend one week on each of the plays, reading the texts closely, examining primary sources to reconstruct historical and cultural contexts, exploring filmed versions and performance histories of the plays, and acting out crucial scenes to explore their expressive possibilities.

Participants will receive a stipend of $3,000.

To read the “Dear Colleague” letter giving more details about the four-week institute, go to www.folger.edu/education and click on the link for the Teaching Shakespeare Institute. Click on “Invitation from the director” in the left-hand menu.

More information is available via e-mail at educate@folger.edu or by phone at 202-675-0395. The online application is available at www.folger.edu/tsi2admission.cfm.

Research at the University of Liverpool has found that Shakespearean language excites positive brain activity, adding further drama to the bard’s plays and poetry.

Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the function of the word within a sentence. This process causes a sudden peak in brain activity and forces the brain to work backwards in order to fully understand what Shakespeare is trying to say.

Professor Philip Davis, from the University’s School of English, said: “The brain reacts to reading a phrase such as ‘he godded me’ from the tragedy of Coriolanus, in a similar way to putting a jigsaw puzzle together. If it is easy to see which pieces slot together you become bored of the game, but if the pieces don’t appear to fit, when we know they should, the brain becomes excited. By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity - a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things.”

Experts believe that this heightened brain activity may be one of the reasons why Shakespeare’s plays have such a dramatic impact on their readers.

Professor Neil Roberts, from the University’s Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre, (MARIARC), explains: “The effect on the brain is a bit like a magic trick; we know what the trick means but not how it happened. Instead of being confused by this in a negative sense, the brain is positively excited. The brain signature is relatively uneventful when we understand the meaning of a word but when the word changes the grammar of the whole sentence, brain readings suddenly peak. The brain is then forced to retrace its thinking process in order to understand what it is supposed to make of this unusual word.”

Read the entire article.

Special thanks to Sue on the Net-Gold list!

So you think you know your Shakespeare, do ya? The folks at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, would like a few minutes of your time. They have put together an online tool that determines how accurately a reader can detect a passage from Shakespeare as opposed to one from a contemporary of his.

From the site:

Many people think authorship can be better determined by a “golden ear test” applying pure artistic judgment than by going through all the fuss of computer testing. Take our golden ear test and see if your intuition agrees with our computer. Some of the following 31 short verse passages are definitely by Shakespeare, some are definitely not by Shakespeare, and others are questionably Shakespeare. Some possibly telltale proper nouns have been omitted, both for Shakespeare and for others. Can you tell which passages are by Shakespeare simply by reading them and following your own impressions?

Take the Shakespeare Golden Ear test.

(I do not have a golden ear. Neither is my ear silver or bronze. But ::sigh:: at least it’s not tin.) How is yours?

What happens when a guy with a little extra time on his hands reconsiders one of the greatest plays ever written? Stick Figure Hamlet, currently under construction and showing a great deal of promise!

	Claudius	Hamlet	Gertrude

Author/illustrator Dan Carroll says he updates the site about 3 times a week and expects to add up to another 150 pages or so, adding, “Somewhere along the line, I realized why so many directors do an abridged version.”

I admire this site on several levels. First, I think we would all have to agree that Carroll is a master of the Stick Figure school of art, a school in which I now consider myself a mere dilettante.

This site would also be a great resource for kids with learning disabilities who might otherwise struggle with Hamlet. The graphics make the dialog easier to understand, helping students see cause-and-effect relationships and the complexities of characters.

But this is also a great site for anyone who appreciates literature. We can sense Carroll’s enthusiasm in the scope of the project and the quality of his work. This is not someone who experienced Hamlet by filling out worksheets or watching a video. Something made the play come to life for Dan Carroll, and he is using his talent to pass it along.

How can teachers introduce students to literature in a way that might cause this kind of response? If we rely on our own passion, we’re in trouble when we teach a piece of literature we aren’t enthusiastic about. Better question: how can we kindle that passion in our students?

Ideas?

I just spent an hour browsing Shakespeare in American Life, a Web companion to the radio documentary on National Public Radio. This outstanding site should be sipped and savored.

Movie buffs, politicians, businesspeople, actors, and teachers—in short, all of us—will find something interesting here. Audio and video files, portraits, posters, advertisements, and a timeline document the impact of Shakespeare in America. (Trivia: first recorded performance of Shakespeare in the New World, 1730, Romeo and Juliet.)

The layout is simple, and the site is rich. Click on one link, and you will find both your target and two related links that you didn’t see before. All of them invite attention.

The education section generously offers lesson ideas for many grade levels. My personal favorite is “Occupation Romeo”. (Romeo as WWF wrestler? You be the judge!)

To say that the Bard’s work has endured because he speaks to timeless issues and creates universal characters has become clichéd, and I apologize for even mentioning it. This site lets that understanding run like white noise as it shows Shakespeare in advertising, in asylums, in music, at school, and at war until it would seem that in fact “all the world’s a stage.”

The site is a project of the Folger Shakespeare Library and is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund; and The Mosaic Foundation of Rita & Peter Heydon.

One of the best-kept secrets in education is Cable in the Classroom.

Cable in the Classroom is an organization of cable programmers and cable providers working together to make programming and other support available to schools. Since our students are as likely to learn from documentaries as from documents, this is a generous gift. Sometimes a good 5-minute clip is all a lesson needs to capture student interest or to illustrate a point. CIC makes these videos available without charge and without commercials.

Cable in the Classroom programming meets these criteria:

• It has extended copyright clearance, usually for one year. Teachers can record something in October and use it in March with a clear conscience.
• It is free from advertising.
• It is free from violence.
• It is designed for the classroom.
• It provides free support materials, usually via download from the Web.
• It is available without charge via cable TV.

Cable in the Classroom members also provide schools with free cable TV programming and broadband services. CIC sponsors and publishes research on the impact of media literacy in the quarterly magazine Threshold. The monthly magazine Cable in the Classroom includes a programming schedule, classroom tips, and other articles of interest to teachers.

The monthly programming guide is also published on the CIC website. Teachers can find broadband projects and podcasts of educational interest there, too. Don’t miss “Shakespeare: Subject to Change”!

Of all the excellent programming available, one of the most fun is the Sports Figures series. ESPN sponsors programming that uses popular athletes to explain and illustrate math and physics concepts. Designed for secondary students, each episode is a great model of explaining a process or concept. One could serve as a prewriting activity before a unit on expository writing, for instance. And if an English student picks up an understanding of vectors in the process, so much the better.

Cable channels and cable providers do this as a public service. Don’t miss it!

What do these three quotations have in common?

• “Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.” (William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night)
• “He that is of the opinion that money will do everything may well be suspected to do everything for money.” (Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack)
• “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” (John F. Kennedy, 1961 Inaugural Addresss)

If you noticed the “mirroring” of words, you noticed chiasmus (or, for rhetorical purists, antimetabole — the distinction is often blurred). In this figure of speech, a thought is emphasized with a bit of wordplay. The structure emphasizes a relationship between concepts.

The name comes from the Greek letter “chi,” which looks like an X. The crossing of lines can be compared to the crossing of thoughts that occurs in the trope.

Never let a fool kiss you          

x

or a kiss fool you.

In classical chiasmus, grammatical structures are inverted, as in this example:

“He labors without complaining and without bragging rests.”

In the first part of the sentence, the verb precedes the prepositional phrase. In the latter part, it follows the phrase.

Political speechwriters sometimes refer to chiasmus as “reversible raincoat sentences.” Because this structure calls attention to itself, it is most effective when used sparingly.