To Teach or Not to Teach: How Hamlet Transformed My Problem Period 

A few days ago, I was ready to go nuclear on my second period.

My administration had grouped all the low-level readers on our continuation campus into one class and handed me the reins. As a second-year teacher, I was naively excited about the prospect of helping our students who need it the most. Three weeks into a nine-week term, I had reached a breaking point. It turns out that grouping students who struggle the most with reading into one class period tends to result in more of those kids having behavioral problems.

Who could have guessed?

I was ready to give up. After two weeks of behavior problems with every single lesson and assignment, I was planning to go hardcore authoritarian for a few days to scare them straight: independent silent reading for the entire class period, with a worksheet, followed by a quiz. I was going to do this for two or three days, hoping the students would fall back in line after realizing that, as much as they hate English, they could hate it even more. It wasn’t like I wanted to be a prison guard, and I was disappointed that we would be reading the first few scenes of our selected text, Hamlet (the No-Fear-Shakespeare edition), in such a boring and limited way. I had drafted the email explaining my plan of attack to my administration, and then decided to give it one more chance. 

I didn’t tell the students how thin the ice they were skating on had become. I didn’t warn them, and I approached the day like I do any class period: with a warm greeting, a consistent routine, and positive reinforcement. This was going to be our second day with the text, and I prepared myself for the worst. I needed some of them to read the roles out loud, a very hard and vulnerable ask for not just a population of students who fell so far behind in credits they needed a continuation campus, but a population within that group of struggling readers. 

And then, on that second day, when my patience felt like it had reached beyond its limit, they shocked me. Two of my biggest distractors asked if they could read today. One student insisted that we play our silly (and somewhat embarrassing) theatre game again when I had not even scheduled it. Many sighed with disappointment when we finished the scenes I had scheduled. The class period that never stopped talking had fallen silent, listening for something rotten in the state of Denmark. 

So what worked? How did a group of reluctant readers suddenly start caring about Shakespeare? 

I have a few theories. 

One is that the students began to feel a sense of responsibility and ownership over the classroom as they took on different roles in the play. While round robin reading has proven to have substantial drawbacks, giving my students not just sections of the text but specific characters, with a translation of Shakespeare that they can actually understand, helped them gain confidence in their own abilities. I hyped Shakespeare up a lot for the first two weeks, assigning a nonfiction article about his background as a supplemental text in our district literacy software, Achieve 3000.

We looked at some of his sonnets, and I was honest with them about the fact that most people find Shakespeare boring as hell and difficult to understand. Then, when they finally got to the text and found that the No-Fear version (which provides a side-by-side modern translation of the older English original) was well within their comprehension, they were proud of their ability to understand and follow along with the story. I had to spend every bit of rapport I had garnered in those first two weeks getting just a small handful of students to volunteer to read for the characters at first, and took on the largest roles in each scene myself.

After each scene, I insisted the class applaud their classmates for their bravery and effort in the readings, and you can bet I was clapping the loudest. This, combined with being trusted with the responsibility of reading a role, led to an intrinsic motivation to behave and keep the classroom moving along. 

My second theory involves the aggressively forgiving culture I cultivate within my class and curriculum. Every single day, after our bell work, I make all the students stand up and guide them through three deep breaths. We then repeat three simple affirmations: “we can do hard things, mistakes are a part of learning, we will do our best.” When students get tripped up on an assignment, or give the wrong answer, and seem embarrassed or ashamed, I point to my whiteboard, where I permanently display these affirmations. I usually repeat the second to them to remind them there is nothing shameful about making a mistake.

My curriculum allows for all assignments to be resubmitted after corrections for full credit, and when giving corrections, I do my best to maintain a neutral, slightly positive tone and find something to praise them for. You may ask if it is exhausting to have to compliment-sandwich every correction. It was, at first. But eventually, finding what my students did well became second nature. If I can’t praise them for something they did correctly, I try to affirm their thought process and where they were coming from before explaining what they need to do differently. 

It may have something to do with the fact that my students know I would never ask them to do something I wouldn’t be willing to do myself. On that first day of Hamlet, before we got to reading, I gathered them in a circle to play a very silly theatre game that involves saying numbers out loud with as much of a specific emotion as possible. Trying to get nonchalant teenagers to yell “seven” as if they were angry or “eleven” as if they were sad felt like drinking hensbane poison myself. So when I said “one” to start us off, you can bet it was the happiest, most shameless, most embarrassing version of “one” I could muster. They were incredibly resistant the first day, but on the second, when other students initiated the game, they leaned into the silliness and all laughed together. 

But finally, what I think may have led to such positive results boils down to one key word: trust. I tell my students regularly that I do not ever intend to give them busywork. I explain in the first week that the skills we learn in English, those of comprehension, communication, and literacy, will prove necessary in their lives, no matter where they end up or what they decide to do. I promise not to waste their time, and ask only that they trust me enough to try their best, even when something seems irrelevant to their lives and aspirations. After all, though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t. 

We won’t ever know the exact magic ingredient that turns a classroom around. After all, as much as we talk about data, every educator knows that teaching is more of an art than a science. And when you consider how we set the stage, direct the choreography, and rehearse our lines, perhaps it’s more than just an art. It’s a performance. And when you perform, the most important thing is not your set dressing and stage; it is the internal confidence to put on the show. “If it be now, ’tis not to come: if it be not to come, it will be now: if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.” 

So break a leg!