That's the title of the first workshop I present to Shakespeare students. It's a thing that we know, somehow, through cultural osmosis, but we don't know we know it. I get students in the classroom to teach me the words they use that confuse their teachers, and I write them down in a “classroom lexicon" that we refer to repeatedly throughout the next few classes. I love it when I hear “She's ACTUALLY writing this down, you guys!" or when a teacher says “That's the most animated I've ever seen them get about language."
I ask the students for the most cutting edge vocabulary, (there should be a word for it - Pop English?) and then I ask them how to spell it, and how the word functions in a sentence. 99% of the time, students haven't thought about whether or not they're using a verb or an adverb, especially because modern vocabulary words so often function as something outside of what Madlibs taught us to name. (That's a verb! That's a noun! Easy enough. That's a... subordinating conjunction?) Spelling is also an issue of high debate, but thanks to text and social media, a lot of the newest words have been communicated through writing - some of them only through text. (For example: nobody says “LOL" out loud, unless you're doing it ironically.) But you don't need to know what a subordinating conjunction is before you have the skill to use it... the students can ABSOLUTELY use the new words they know in many, many sentences in order to demonstrate to me a word's multiple functions.
They do not know how amazing that is, so I tell them.
Introducing philology to the people who are on the cutting edge of the newest English languages is a fascinating experience, and I firmly believe that it unwedges Shakespeare from an entrenchment in a racist history.
Teaching Shakespeare in the United States began in colonial America, when people will sill learning in ways very much like Shakespeare's own schooling. (The first European colonizers, including but not limited to Spanish conquistadors, started plundering American soil and the indigenous people living on it well before Shakespeare died. Our shiny new country is closer to the Englishest of English historical literature than we think.) The lessons in colonial and antebellum era were mostly focused on memorization, rhetoric, and elocution - all the makings of a gentleman. Students, sons of white landowners, memorized Shakespeare passages in order to run for president. Of course, these methods were also used by European colonizers around the world to teach indigenous people the English language, eroding or eradicating native languages.
Side note: It's nice to hear that Unesco declared 2019 its year of indigenous languages, in an effort to “preserve, revitalise and promote indigenous languages around the world.” I'm excited to read about the results of their efforts - it's only February, I can be patient.
Side side note: Bollywood Shakespeare is my favorite Shakespeare, and I just learned that has less to do with colonization than I thought.
It's no surprise that Shakespeare's ties to colonization (and the general idea that white culture is superior culture) makes for a parallel history of PROBLEMATIC teaching methods. I have planted my boots in this mud, and I am belly laughing at the irony of it all. When Shakespeare was writing, spelling and grammar weren't even standardized in the English language, so modern rules don't actually help you read the play. Shakesepare was a good playwright because he listened to the words people used at the time and wrote them down, legitimizing his day's “Pop English" and preserving it for the rest of history- he didn't invent the English vocabulary any more than Lizzo does. Shakespeare's plays were printed poorly, in multiple formats with multiple alterations - any argument along the lines of “but that's not what Shakespeare intended!" is hip-deep in bullshit. And of course there's the tired old “Shakesepare wrote plays, not books" argument you could talk yourself hoarse with, and still we teach it from the page first, because tradition.
We expect students to read “the height of English literature" by giving them essay questions on themes that perhaps resonate with them today, but without giving them the tools to understand how the language relates to their own modern Pop English. This is baffling to me. How can you expect the most brilliant inventors of today's English to understand the most brilliant inventor of English from 400 years ago without first studying HOW ENGLISH EVOLVES? English evolves.
Dr. Christopher Emdin has a lot to say about how white teachers, entrenched in a history of colonial teaching methods, enter urban environments in much the same way that colonial Americans “taught" indigenous populations. His research and methods and ideas about teaching pedagogy are born out of his love for teaching science and math - I'm just applying these ideas to English in a way that legitimizes and celebrates the way students naturally communicate. Instead of eradicating their “neo-indigenous" use of Pop English and replacing it with Shakespeare, I want to allow my Shakespeare students to study and then celebrate the similarities and differences between the two in an honest way. It's time we validate their English from an academic standpoint. (Note to self: next blog post might be about the racist history of teaching elocution for the actor, and why students should be learning to use their own voices, even when speaking 400 year old English.)
The little work I've already done on this in classrooms has given me back more than I ever could have invented on my own.
I will continue to dedicate myself to this philological agenda.
Because I STAN Shakespeare. Periodt.