“We start Romeo and Juliet next week!”

It was the moment I’ve literally been waiting eight years for.  Last night at dinner, my daughter informed me that her class was starting Shakespeare this week.

My children have literally been raised on Shakespeare – my oldest since she was old enough to ask me questions, my middle since before she can remember, and my youngest since before he could walk (he saw his first Tempest while still in a stroller).

August, 2007.  Or this one from March 2006 where I even wrote, “My daughter is only four and it pains me that I can’t share Shakespeare with her yet.”

I have Shakespeare action figures in the house. My phone plays “Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day” (as sung by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour).  My children start asking me questions about Shakespeare, and the journey begins.  It’s been around them since before they can remember, of course, but now we can actually interact on the subject.  The link is just one of many, many stories I’ve posted over the years.

Many times I have gone into classrooms to volunteer, knowing full well that second and third graders are unlikely to understand and retain the original language. Instead, my mission has always been to break the stigma of Shakespeare as difficult and boring, something to be dreaded.  I will often say to classrooms, “Even if you don’t understand everything that we talked about today, one day years from now when you’re in high school, a teacher is going to drop Romeo and Juliet in front of you and while some of the kids groan and roll their eyes, you’re going to be the ones to say, “Ohhhhhhh!  I get this!” Obviously my children will be the ones to lead by example. Their friends and schoolmates will only see me a couple of times a year (if that).  My children eat sleep and breathe it.

And now that day is here. Has the mission been a success? Is my daughter going to fly through the class, bringing all kinds of passion for the subject with her to share? Will the teacher discover the junior Shakespeare geeklet she’s destined to become?

Her first assignment is to write a sonnet.  So I suppose that the teacher’s doing some sort of crash course in all things Shakespeare before diving into the play, which is fine and probably necessary. She tells me that part of the assignment is to write an actual, good sonnet and not just count syllables, and I nod my approval at this teacher’s standards.  I ask what she knows about sonnets, she says something about syllables and then tells me that they literally just started today, so they haven’t covered much.  I ask her what a “volta” is, and tell her to get back to me when the class gets that far.

I ask whether she’s at all mentioned that she was raised on Shakespeare, has known Sonnet 18 since she was five years old, and along with her siblings can count herself as the youngest person to ever see the inside of the Folger Shakespeare vault.  She said, “It hasn’t come up.”

It turns out that she’s deathly afraid of her Shakespeare teacher.  He’s one of those guys with a dark, sarcastic sense of humor that’s very intimidating to the students. I’ve seen it in action, and I’m not a fan. But I’ve seen it only briefly, through my daughter’s filter, so I may have been too hard on the guy. It’s quite possible that I’d get along with him swimmingly. He’s a good teacher, her grades are good. He’s just not the kind of guy students feel that they can have any sort of extra conversation with.

I remind my daughter that this has been years in the making and she will be missing a tremendous opportunity if she doesn’t say *something*.  I fully expect that most of the other students in the room know her relationship to Shakespeare, so maybe one of them will say something.  Even if he’d asked, “Is anyone already familiar with Shakespeare?” she would have had the opportunity to say any number of things, she’s got a literal lifetime of relevant stories.

The best possible outcome is that she does mention it, the teacher is receptive, and I get to come in and volunteer in that class.  I’m not holding out hope, though, because as the kids have gotten older the room for volunteer parents in that capacity has approached nil.  In elementary school, any diversion from the norm is seen as interesting and entertaining for the students, a break from the pattern, and is welcome. But as they get older it’s more about “What are you teaching them, how much time are you spending on that topic, and how are you going to measure it? Ok, great, move on. Repeat.”  I can keep my fingers crossed – honestly, I won’t be able to help it, I’ll be thinking of what I’d say if given the chance – but I have to be prepared for the opposite end of the spectrum, which is that she tells him and he doesn’t care, and it turns into just a regular series of lessons like with geometry where the teacher says one thing, then my daughter comes home and I explain all the good and interesting stuff that the teacher has chosen to gloss over.

I will report back regularly.  Brace yourselves, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!

All I know about “The Fosters” is that the commercials keep coming up while my pre-teen children try to watch their shows, and those commercials typically want to talk about very not pre-teen things.  So it’s not a show I hold in high regard.  I knew I was on the right track when this story appeared last month about a high school banning Romeo and Juliet because it glorifies teen suicide.  They have the obligatory student debate about it … and “ban it” apparently won.

So last night I’m in the kitchen making dinner and I know the kids have got the ABC Family Channel (now “Freeform”) on, like they do.  So when I hear a random “Juliet” come out of the tv my head naturally whips around to see what’s up. My first thought is, “This must be something having to do with last month’s episode,” while still thinking, “Why would they still be talking about last month’s episode?”

And they’re singing. They are in masquerade attire, and they are singing.  What dark magic is this?

Apparently, in the spirit of Glee, it’s a Romeo and Juliet Rock Musical.

Does anybody follow the plot line of this show and know what’s going on? This could be awesome.  Every television show about high school kids has, at one point or another, done a Shakespeare episode.  And it’s almost always about the balcony scene.  But I don’t recall anyone attempting to do an entire retelling of the play – as a musical, no less!  I’m kind of excited about this.

Whenever I spotted a headline like “Coding is More Important Than Shakespeare,” I thought, “This ought to be good.” I think regular readers know me well enough at this point to know that I know both subjects quite well, and often cross them.

Here’s the thing. He didn’t say that coding is more important than Shakespeare (and he even returns in the comments of his original piece) to point this out.  The word Shakespeare appears just once in his original arguing, as does the word “programming”.  The word “coding” is absent.

It is a massive article by internet standards and, perhaps proving his point, most of the people who read it will not have the mental ability to understand it – and I count myself among those that don’t. I get his general idea that there is a set of “stuff people should learn” that is objectively more useful (and thus important) than other stuff.  He then goes into great detail with specific examples, and I’ll just say that poor Malcolm Gladwell does not come out of it well.

I like Khosla’s summary in the comments – “If there are 100 things you can learn, but you’ve only got space to teach 32 of them, how do you decide which 32?”  It’s a valid question that I ask myself regularly as I watch my children progress through school, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will never again need to know half of what they’re being tested on. I think we should have more focus on finance, personally.

By the logic of practicality, I think he’s right. If you told me my kids’ school was going to offer programming or Shakespeare, I’d vote for programming. I think my life kind of proves that point, because I am not sitting here with a Shakespeare degree and self-taught in programming, but rather vice versa. This morning I had a conversation with the CTO of my company, who I learned used to be a theatre guy.

You have your entire life to learn whatever you want, and you shouldn’t ever stop. The debate isn’t over what is useful or important to learn – the original piece asks specifically about majoring in liberal arts.  You learn important things every day. No one is stopping you from learning Shakespeare whenever and however you want. But our society’s ability to place teachers in front of you, people who are paid to be there, in buildings that are paid to keep the lights on, and to provide you with text books and so on, for a certain period of time, is limited. We need to choose.

My daughter is in eighth grade and I believe the only Shakespeare she’ll see this year is Romeo and Juliet, at the end of the year, briefly.  When she goes to high school I’m led to believe that English lit is an 11th grade class, so I assume that if she sees any Shakespeare, that’s where it will be. But when it came time to ask about the curriculum I didn’t say, “Why isn’t there more Shakespeare?”  I said, “Why isn’t there more programming?” I wished there was more Shakespeare, sure. But, like Khosla said, if I’ve got two questions and only opportunity to ask one, which one do I pick?

I wish we could choose Shakespeare more often.  But I understand why we typically can’t. Why in the world do you think I’ve been exposing my kids to Shakespeare since birth? Did you really think I was going to rely on the system to provide it to them?  I consider it my job to educate my kids until a time where they can educate themselves.  The system merely provides some structure and filler for a period of time, intended to jump start them into the “real” world where, hopefully, they won’t fall flat on their faces as soon as someone stops holding their hand.

Imagine a production of Romeo and Juliet that opens in the tomb, with both dead. Cue prologue.

One of the most common questions asked about Romeo and Juliet is why Shakespeare gives away the ending (“A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life”) in the first lines. It is the very definition of a spoiler, and it is baked right into the script.

Today on the way to work I was thinking about other stories that open up three quarters of the way through. We’re in the middle of a wedding, or the good guy is being chased by a horde of bad guys, and we have just a moment to wonder, “How’d we get here?” before the scene changes, some sort of “Six months prior…” card appears on screen, and we start the real story. There’s a stake in the ground now. Instead of sitting back and thinking, “I wonder what’s going to happen?” you’re left thinking, “I wonder how we’re going to get from here to there?”

That’s exactly what Shakespeare does. Granted, the modern version usually opens with the good guy in significant peril but, you know, not actually dead yet. Still, though, the point stands. You immediately open with a “Wait, what? How does that happen exactly?” moment where you find yourself thrown into the end of the story, and then suddenly the scene changes and you get to see the story from the beginning.

Don’t forget Paris!  Fine, you know this is Romeo and Juliet, you hear “pair of star-crossed lovers” and see a young man and women entwined in death, you get that.  But who the heck is the random dude on the floor? What’s his story?

Oo! I just thought of something even better. Instead of opening to the scene of them already dead, open to Romeo still alive and holding the poison. Or, I suppose, Juliet holding the dagger.  Play it on alternate nights. Really build up the suspense.  I mean, you know in your head that they both die. But with tricks like this you still have to spend the play wondering if just maybe?