Giving Students Choice Can Allow Less Anxiety About Shakespeare and His Words.

Shakespeare Oh Shakespeare. How you intimidate your readers, yet gain a growing audience that adores you. It is a known fact that our students will feel intimidated by William's language that he uses as well as his character names even seem confusing at times. Our job is to encourage student performance in order to get them excited to read about his plays. I read "Sparking: A Methodology to Encourage Student Performance" by Joan Ozark Holmer and I really liked all of the ideas that was discussed about what students did in order to portray Shakespeare's motifs. First and foremost, Joan identifies sparking as a "flexible technique that allows for and encourages student performance in  various ways but does not mandate traditonal acting"(90). Of course it is always nice to traditionally act our scenes for the class, it is always great to incorporate different ways to do this into the curriculum as well. This allows individual freedom while still bringing performance to the assignment (90). Some ideas of how sparking is illustrated throughout the course is through group projects that plan for class discussion, handouts, acting out performances, and in depth topics such as the Shakespearean theatre, culture and society. Some students used debates, skits, discussions, interviews, traditional acting out of scenes, dramatic performance in order to give it a contemporary twist to it, overall tapping into all of the students interests. Students are encouraged to use primary and secondary sources, music, outside dialouge, bibliographies, explanatory assignments, research on prostitution and brothels, symbolism of costumes, the audience in the theatre, research about instruments of the time period versus modern instruments in order to perform a visual aspect of Shakespeare (92). Joan mentions that "sometimes sparking provides quite unexpected advantages" (93). This allows the students to have a better understanding of Shakespeare's time period and the language he uses in contemporary ways. Teachers should encourage students to even dress up in atire that was typical of Shakespearean time. This allows for the students to make connectoions and comparisons. Even allowing them to perform it at home and video recording it would give them a chance to advance their technology skills as well as introduce the class to the vocabulary of the literature and theatre of his time. I thought it was also a nice add in that Joan mentions a student who studied aboard openly shared their perspective of how different cultures value different concepts, this hopefully can happen in each of our classes as well.
I really like these ideas because it gives students individuality and choice when overwhelmed with Shakespeare. Its a contemporary twist that gives students more options of interest. Such as how the Manga version of Romeo and Juliet does. I liked this version because it gave you a different aspect to look at and read about. Yet it was a bit confusing to me because it was hard to follow the characters visually at first but got the hang of who was who in the end, Similiar to how it is just reading Shakespeare's plays, because he names his characters so close, like Grumio and Gremio, ect.

I think it was beneficial to read these articles and allowing us to have choice in which one we wanted to read because as sparking gives students choice, these articles gave teachers a choice of how they want to conquer teaching Shakespeare.