Well, we've started reading Hamlet. I went into Hamlet with a certain kind of dread held near and dear to my heart. I've read it once before and it wasn't the most pleasant of experiences. To be frank, I hated it. I despised it, loathed it, wanted to rip the pages out of the binding. I've never had all that great of a resume with Shakespeare in the first place, and then all of Hamlet's long monologues/soliloquies really threw me off. Let's just say I'm extremely thankful to Ms. Holmes for stopping after most scenes to explain what's going on. I actually think that I like it more now she's explaining things, It'll help to focus in on other things on the second read (although honestly, I don't know how much I'll actually be able to extract from that tangled mess of words).
I'm pretty sure the only thing we've done besides this is the blogs. I guess the blogs are going okay. I really don't like open prompts. I have trouble doing them in forty minutes, and I don't like not being able to completely develop my own opinions on a work (because you're limited to a certain idea/prompt). Also, I sometimes have problems with finding evidence without the book.
Hannah, I agree with you about Hamlet, I also found it quite confusing at first. All of Shakespeare's plays are relatively confusing because they are written in a style of English that is relatively foreign to us today, but this play is especially confusing because of Hamlet's confusing language. He tends to speak in metaphor that often make his meaning quite difficult to understand. And, as you say, he has an outrageous amount of lines- about half the whole play. But I think with Ms. Holmes explaining the basic ideas of some of the scenes, its a lot easier to understand during the second read. The movies help too, because it gives us an idea of the tone in some of the speeches, which is sometimes impossible to tell from the writing alone.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to see you guys looking through notebooks, assignments, and planners, and glancing over the Spruz calendar before you write these so that your memories are fresh and you can be thorough in covering the things we do in the textbook, the in-class assignments and activities, and so on. Also, remember that the primary aim of this assignment is to synthesize old and new material and to synthesize new material with material from other courses and the "real world.”
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