Re-Dedication
Dunkirk NY – I go through spells where teaching becomes absolutely ungodly. Horrifying, in fact. Always it seems that it comes right after I finish a show. When I’m directing, a show gives me the excuse to put things off, to pay less attention, to coast a bit. But once a show comes down, what’s left of my classroom seems to be in a tattered mess, and it’s time to get to mending.
Today I ask myself this question: what did I get into undergraduate teaching for? To what must I re-dedicate myself? If, at this point, you’re expecting a definitive answer, my apologies for disappointing you. I don’t have one. I’m just asking the question today.
I’ve been struggling with this issue because I am facing a conundrum in my Shakespeare class. In the past I have usually culminated that class by presenting some sort of Shakespearean “production” which becomes their actual final exam. One year I did a cutting from King Lear, and I played Lear with them taking other parts. One year we took one scene from Richard III and had six different interpretations of it. This year I had conceived an idea of doing a reduced version of Hamlet, but this project has morphed into ideas which are competing with one another, where now it’s an exploration on the subjective nature of linguistic interpretation. We are doing two scenes, the Ophelia rejection scene and the closet scene, and exploring different linguistic interpretations of them so as to explore and understand the fluidity of language, and thus the fluidity of interpretation. They’ve come up with some interesting ideas, even if those ideas are monodimensional.
Yet as I watch them prepare these scenes, it struck me yesterday that much of this is way over their heads. They can barely scan the text, let alone delve into linguistic interpretation. They can barely make personal connections to the text. They can barely discern the rhetorical devices within the scenes and monologues. They can barely feel the subtle shifts of thought from moment to moment. Language, in fact, has become almost foreign to them.
If undergraduate education is about anything, it should be about the fundamentals. The basics. But as I move generationally further and further away from my students, it seems to be that the basics keep getting redefined, and the bar gets lower. And most basic to anything in theatre is language, text, story. I envy my colleagues in the School of Music, because at the very least they are not forced to accept students into their studios who cannot read music or not play the instrument at all. As acting teachers, though, we are expected, at the college level, to take in students who have little to no formal training and just had a good time doing the high school play, so why not act? Students who are starstruck. Not students who have had some past with sophisticated ideas and modes of thought.
And so is this my frustration? Must I constantly be confined to the basics? Must I re-dedicate myself to the basics? Will the basics just keep getting more and more basic? And is that all there will ever be for me now? -twl
