I may have heard of the Juliet Club before.  Something about answering letters written to Juliet about love and romance advice.  Apparently there’s a contest for the best one. Neat site, especially if you’re a Juliet fan.  They even offer a CD full of everything you could possibly want to know about Juliet.  

I’ve done this topic before, but Sonnet Writers has a nice article up that explains iambic pentameter graphically, putting the emphasized syllables in bold.  Some of it is a little borderline to me, obviously coming from the “sonnet writer” camp and not the Shakespeare camp, like where he says “Sonnet 30 follows iambic pentameter very nicely.”  Oh?  In which sonnet does he not do that, exactly?  And “there appear to be some exceptions” to the 5 (he says 10) iambs per line rule, although there are “logical reasons for these.”   Maybe he just said that wrong — they *appear* to be exceptions, but they’re not, and here’s why. Other than that, though, he breaks it right down to the individual syllable, explaining when some words run into others (“many a”, 3 syllables,  becomes more like “man ya”, 2 syllables) or the other way around, where “be-moan-ed” is 3 syllables but “van-ish’d” is 2.  

Even though I’ve never been a teacher of Shakespeare, I’m often pondering the whole “Why learn Shakespeare?” question, as if I might stumble across the answer.  After all, I took the classes in high school just like everybody else, and claimed to hate them just like everybody else.  But then I got to college and had to pick a humanities project, and found myself strangely drawn back to Shakespeare.  When a chance came to work with an educational videogame company and pick my project, I chose Shakespeare.  Before I knew it I was becoming quite the Shakespeare geek. But enough of that rambling, back to the topic at hand.  My memories of learning Shakespeare in high school are of the “broccoli” variety.  You can guess what I’m going to say next, right?  “Trust me, it’s good for you, just do it.”  Bleh.  Does that ever work?  I’m pleasantly surprised to see the universe looking out for me, as Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users has an article on exactly that topic.  She’s got a picture of broccoli right at the top of the article! The way to win the battle, the article goes on to say, is to invoke optimism and hope.  Emphasize the pleasure.  “Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear,” it says.  I think the best teachers know this.  Nobody is really hoping to say “Sit down and shut up, and just read the thing so we can get out of here.”  Every teacher I’ve spoken with goes out of their way to seek out games and quizzes and activities for the students to do, and inevitably breaks out the movie at the end of class.  They know that it should be fun.  I guess the real question is, does the fun outweigh the “you have to do it, it’s good for you” weight that comes with the subject matter?   Is the real hurdle not with the subject matter at all, but with some students’ instinctive rebellion against anything they’re forced to do?  Do calculus teachers have the same problem? Just some rambling thoughts on the subject so that I get them down.  Feel free to chime in while I get back to work.  

The Simpsons have done Shakespeare a couple of times. I’m not sure I remember this particular scene, though. Bart as Hamlet, Ralph Wiggum as Laertes. Here’s my mad face! Rrrrrrrr!

Ok, I’ve known about Shakespeare the Meerkat for awhile, but never really saw any reason to post since I don’t follow the show.  For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, the Animal Planet television channel has a show called “Meerkat Manor” which is some sort of animal reality show.  They follow around like 40 meerkats and try to produce the documentary style footage up as dramatically as they can, like a mother meerkat defending the babies from predators, and so on.  One of them is named Shakespeare.  He’s apparently quite popular, with more than a few blogs on the subject.   Well now there’s something to post about.  Apparently season two of Meerkat Manor has started, and Shakespeare is missing.  Even the Today show picked up the story, but they don’t have a link up yet.  People are very upset.  The producers are being realistic about it – they’ve said themselves that they just don’t know what happened to him.  I think people forget that this is a show about animals tracked in the wild, so simply losing one is actually quite possible.  The producers assume that Shakespeare is dead and that they just haven’t found the body.