The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Shakespeare, Teens, and the East

Monday, April 6, 2009

Shakespeare, Teens, and the East

This is a picture of Philip, as taken by Philip:

This is a picture of me, as taken by Philip:

This is a picture of the guy that is causing problems:

It began yesterday when we were cleaning his room "together" which meant I gathered glackis (a term my daughter uses to describe the plates with spoons or forks stuck to them)while he sat on his bed texting his friends. I came across an answer sheet on Romeo and Juliet. The question was:

Why, in your opinion, does Romeo kill Tybalt? Philip's response?

Because he was bipolar.

Philip went on to explain that he acted just like his friend, R., before she was diagnosed bipolar and sent to the alternative school.

Philip has really struggled with Shakespeare. Let me rephrase that: I have struggled with Philip sliding under the table while I tried to explain metaphor and theme to him in the play's context.

A long time ago, when I was 22, I stood in front of a ninth grade class and somehow got the play across to them. I do remember wondering whether or not the amount of time it took to get a little bit of Shakespeare through to fourteen year olds was worth it or not. I still wonder the same thing, but I was determined that Philip get something out of this experience.

"Let's go to the kitchen table," I said.

"No. Mom. AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.WHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYY?"

The kitchen table means homework, so for twenty minutes (and the promise of letting him skip the egg hunt with his little sister's friends) we talked about Shakespeare.
I explained metaphor, and hyperbole. He nodded with the glazed over look I get when my husband explains how he is going to change the sprockets on his bike.

"K, Philip, listen to this line. "But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the..."

He looked at me. He yawned.

"He thinks Juliet is beautiful and luminous, all he has been yearning for."

Philip nods. I think maybe there was a breakthrough. "Remember about metaphors?"

"Yup."

"Ok, so 'It is the east, and Juliet is the..."

His eyes light up. He's getting it!

"Ok, Philip, 'It is the east, and Juliet is the..."

"West. Juliet is the west, right?"

8 comments:

Christy Raedeke said...: He's a Deductive Logician! Love it! He may not like Shakespeare but he might dig some Aristotle. I'll bet he scores really high on IQ tests.

My favorite part is that you bargained away the egg hunt for that conversation...; Monday, 06 April, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: He does get decent grades, and based on the effort he puts into school, luck has to be involved. He's really only interested in music right now -- and his friends.

And the egg hunt -- luckily Emma had a friend over and they got so caught up in it, it was a seamless negotiation.; Monday, 06 April, 2009
Katie Anderson said...: Dangit! I just posted a long comment and it somehow erased???

Love Philip stories :-); Tuesday, 07 April, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: I hate when that happens, Katie.

Yeah, Philip keeps us all pretty amused : ); Tuesday, 07 April, 2009
Nora MacFarlane said...: Priceless!; Wednesday, 08 April, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: Once again, this is great, and very familiar. I sat with our kid, supporting her through Macbeth and Lord of the Flies, so I do know how this feels. I like the part about letting Philip off the Easter egg thing too. Raising teens is all about plea bargaining.

And it's eerie: I very nearly blogged just now about my class's opinions of Slumdog Millionaire and how The Bard was there for them in their hour of need.; Thursday, 09 April, 2009
Nora MacFarlane said...: Ann - I nominated you for an award on my blog. Love your blog!; Thursday, 09 April, 2009
Anonymous said...: It is extremely interesting for me to read this post. Thank you for it. I like such topics and anything that is connected to them. I definitely want to read a bit more on that blog soon.

Bella Simpson
nyc escort girls; Wednesday, 08 September, 2010

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Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***