Understanding (?) Hamlet

The last time that I taught our Introduction to Literature course, I assigned Shakespeare's Hamlet in order to discuss performance. I call it "Night of a Thousand Hamlets," and it involves showing numerous clips of the "To Be or Not to Be" speech done by various actors (Olivier, Branagh, Gibson, etc.). I also give a reading quiz to see that everyone in class has kept up with the assignments.

Among the questions I asked were "How does Ophelia die?" and "What does Hamlet ask of Horatio at the end of the play?" I'm usually stunned by the answers. Even if you've not fully read the play, you'd think there are enough cultural references to Hamlet out there for someone to guess correctly. Not quite.

I did not correct any misspellings or grammatical errors in the following answers.

How does Ophelia die?

• “Being grazed by the poison sword”
• “May have been grased by the sword”
• “Ophelia dies by drinking poison”
• “By poison”
• “Ophelia commits suicide”
• “She is murdered”
• “She kills herself”
• “Ophelia dies”
• “Ophelia goes insane after her father’s death and kills herself"

What does Hamlet ask of Horatio at the end of the play?

• “Hamlet asks Horatio to avenge his death”
• “He asks Horatio to look after his mother”
• “Hamlet asks Horatio to sneak him out of the palace”
• “Hamlet asks Horatio that country”
• “Hamlet asks Horatio to defend him”
• “To flee the kingdom”
• “Hamlet asks Horatio to give him the cup to drink”

You'd think grading short reading quizzes (just 3-4 questions each) would be simple, perhaps even boring. However, the answers above would indicate that it's never dull, no matter how simple the answers might be.

End-of-Year Confusion

Sometimes when reading student work, I am completely confused. I'm never certain if some of the confusion results from the ubiquity of AutoCorrect or a lack of comprehension from the writer.

For example, what follows is the concluding paragraph from an essay about Target's marketing strategies. It was not, however, indented in the original so that you could tell it was the start of a new paragraph.

"This only proves that target has use many strategies to take a bandage of the marketing to breakfast from kiss from keep customers ethical marketing to. In being all onions to their store to buy products that they need."

I read the entire essay that this paragraph allegedly concludes, and I can honestly state that I have no idea what the writer was trying to say here.

It's All in the Details

I was cleaning out my office at the end of the fall semester and came across a stack of final essays from my Development Writing students from a couple of years ago. We're obligated to keep graded work for at least one year after the end of a term just in case a student wants to come by and pick up work or in case there's a grade appeal and you need to supply additional evidence that the student didn't initially have access to. 

Developmental Writing essays are typically short, so I took a few minutes to read through them again before putting them in the recycling bin. The assignment was a simple one: the student had to evaluate a product or a place or some example of entertainment (a TV show, a movie, a song, etc.). As I told them on the assignment sheet, the key would be the details that they gave to support their assertions about the quality of what they chose to evaluate. Below are some examples of the details that they gave.

• "I have had many great moments there." (None of those great moments were described or mentioned.

• "My overall evaluation of this place is that it is a good park that has many cool features." (None of the park's particular features were listed or included.)

• "X is a medium sized restaurant where there are plenty of tables inside and a couple of tables outside for you to sit and eat. When you go inside they greet you by saying 'Welcome to X.' Once you order your sandwich you can see how they make it. You don’t have to get up and get your sandwich they will bring it to you." (I'm not sure that any of this is particularly unique in restaurants. Aren't these details common to lots of different restaurants?)

• "It’s mostly good." (How can I possibly not know what is meant by this assessment? It just says it all, doesn't it?)

• "There is mostly bad things about X but they are small things." (Those small things are never mentioned, just alluded to here. The writer only stuck to the good things.)

• "It’s mostly good, but there’s bad." (I did tell them that nothing is all good or all bad, and I suggested that they try to look at both the positive and the negative. I guess the student gave me what I asked for.)

• "They also have a numerous amount of drinks such as root beer, strawberry lemonade, ginger ale and peach tea just to name a few, to spice things up for the grown and sexy they have a fully equipped bar with a selection of hundreds of alcoholic beverages to choose from." (I'm dying to know what it means to be both "grown and sexy." I think I've been one or the other at times, but never both at once, so I don't think I can order from the bar in this place.)

One of the traits of developing writers that I most admire is their naivete at how others don't know what's inside their heads. They assume that most people have very similar experiences or backgrounds, so they don't explain what they think should be apparent to everyone else. It's one of the toughest jobs as a writing teacher to convince students that I and other readers don't actually know what they were thinking when they wrote down something, that I really do need more information, more details in order to understand.

It's one of the highlights for me as a teacher when students grow and improve in their use of details and examples, when they fully develop their ideas because they are truly considering that someone else is going to read what they've written. Don't take my sharing of these examples as anything more than my recognition that sometimes I do fail at achieving this goal. 

Clearing Things Up

I think that some people who read this blog might think that I complain too much about my students and their work. Honestly, most of my students try their best to be successful, and I admire their tenacity and their work ethic. I enjoy my job, particularly when I'm able to see students learn and grow in their writing abilities. Every teacher, though, has at least one student--sometimes at least one student per class--who just doesn't seem to grasp the concepts you're trying to teach.

In my introductory literature course last semester, I worked a lot on thesis statements. I tried to suggest that students should be interpreting literary works in ways that would allow other readers to feel like they were being asked to participate in the interpretation. In particular, I warned against making the analysis too personal in nature since that can limit the audience for the essay.

We covered many different aspects that comprise different works of literature based upon the genres of fiction, poetry, and drama. I encouraged the students to consider incorporating multiple aspects in their interpretations, but I reminded them that their thesis statements would need to be unified and their paragraphs would need to be directly linked to each other and to the thesis.

All of this sounds like regular freshman composition level stuff, doesn't it?

Here's the thesis statement for one of the papers submitted by the student who struggled the most throughout the semester despite my having read and commented upon each draft and despite having gone to get additional tutoring and despite having come to my office to talk about this paper in particular: "Regardless of what the focus is a story heavily focused on one aspect uses other aspects to further the main one and the story I chose is no different. The story I chose for this assignment was Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield. I chose to analyze this story for the assignment because the character of Miss Brill interests me."

If you read this thesis, do you have any idea what the essay is going to discuss in terms of how to interpret Mansfield's story? Are you any clearer after having read those sentences as to what the main point of the essay is going to be?

You might be wondering if the essay "settled down" after the introduction and delved into the story with gusto and revealed some interesting analytical insights. What happened was each paragraph tackled a different trait of fiction, so there was a paragraph about the plot (which just retold us the sequence of what happened in the story), one paragraph about characterization (which just described the character of Miss Brill by telling us all of the things that happen to her in the story), one paragraph about the setting (which recounted each of the places where action occurs in the story), and so on.

Much of the rest of the class earned A's and B's on their essays and for their final grades. Of course, there are always C's and D's scattered throughout the roster as well, usually because students do not complete all of the work. It's seldom because they are unable to do the work or do it well; they just don't do it at all. Every now and then, though, you get a student who just cannot seem to progress beyond a certain point of understanding. It's perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of being a teacher when you cannot seem to reach a student like that. 

Misreading

Whenever I teach a literature course, I quiz my students a lot. In fact, they have a quiz almost every day so that I can make sure they are keeping up with the reading. I don't ask them interpretive questions on these quizzes; I'm just asking for them to recall significant details of the poem or story or play. Sometimes, their answers demonstrate that they either haven't read carefully or haven't read at all.

This past fall, I was teaching American Literature since 1800, the second-semester survey course. One of the plays I tend to assign during the weeks that we cover the 20th Century is Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. Yes, I do show them a few clips from the movie, but we talk about the play because, of course, some of the more "sordid" details of the play had to be left out during filming. The quiz I gave that day led to some interesting answers. You can't attribute some of these misreadings to people having watched the film instead of the book. These are just wrong answers.

First, I asked them what reason Blanche DuBois gives at the start of the play for why she has come to New Orleans. One student said, "To work as a [sic] English teacher," which is interesting given that Blanche has been removed from her job as an English teacher back home. As open-minded as the citizens of New Orleans might be, I don't think that she's likely to find employment as a teacher again any time soon. The most baffling response, though, was "She doesn't belong in the country." I have no idea where that one came from. I don't know if we're talking about the "country" as in "not the city" or if we're talking about the United States of America. Either way, the answer just makes no sense.

Early on in the play, Stella tries to hide her pregnancy from her sister because she thinks Blanche doesn't approve of her husband Stanley Kowalski. I simply asked, "What secret does Stella initially try to keep from her sister?" One of the strangest wrong answers was "Stanley." Given that Blanche meets him in the first act, I don't know how Stella can keep him a secret. Another answer of "that she is in love with Mitch" might just be a confusion of which female character is which. However, if Stella is in love with Mitch, that's a secret that's been kept from the audience all these years too.

I also asked students about Belle Reve, Blanche and Stella's childhood home, and about why Stanley wants to see Blanche's papers about Belle Reve. Those are both significant to the plot of the play. They did okay with those questions, provided they answered at all, but when I asked about The Flamingo, all hell seemed to break loose. A sample of some of the more eye-opening wrong answers:

• "It’s a somewhat lucrative hotel"
• "It is a hotel that you can go to for just a few hours for prostitution"
• "A whorehouse in the town Blanche used to live in"
• "A brothel that Blanche work at"

The Flamingo is an infamous hotel near Belle Reve where Blanche does wind up living for a time, and she certainly does enjoy the company of men while she is there, but it is definitely not a whorehouse or brothel. In fact, Blanche has to leave town because even the owners and other patrons of The Flamingo think that she is too "loose." (By the way, I have no idea what the student was trying to say in describing it as a "lucrative hotel." I suppose it was, but still...)

One of the most common questions I ask about stories or novels or plays is about the ending. I just want to make sure that the students have actually made it to the end of the work and that they have some sense of how the author has tried to wrap things up. Unfortunately, the last question is the one that is most often left blank. However, some will attempt an answer even when they haven't quite gotten that far in the literary work. One student summed it up: "The play ends when Blanche decides to leave because Mitch doesn’t want her anymore. She is done." Well, I'm not sure that Mitch is the most significant aspect of why Blanche decides to leave. I think Stanley (and Stella) have a lot more to do with it, and anyone who's seen the play would not attribute the ending to any decision on Blanche's part.



I have taken a different approach in the last couple of semesters to quizzes. Instead of giving the quiz at the beginning of the class session, I now hand them out at the end of class, after we've had a chance to discuss the work. You might guess that the scores have gone up since I started doing this. However, oddly enough, they haven't really changed all that much. I thought two things might happen: students who had done the reading would be reminded of specific details and those who hadn't done the reading could perhaps pick up some key information during the class discussion. As you've seen from some of the answers I've shared in this post, though, it doesn't seem to have made that much of a difference.

A Little Regret

What I Actually Said and Did:

I was returning graded quizzes at the end of my first class today when a student got up to leave. She told me that she had to leave early in order to get to her next class on time. I checked my watch: 11:34 a.m., one minute left in class. I told her that she would still have ten minutes to get to her next class since no class on campus would begin before 11:45 a.m. Besides, I was only seconds away from returning her quiz. She told me that she needed to go on anyway and just couldn't wait any longer. I told her that no place on campus was more than ten minutes away; I know this because I've had back-to-back classes in the northernmost building and the southernmost building on campus, and I made it from one to the other in under ten minutes. She said she walked slowly and needed to leave to get to her other class on time. At this point, I simply turned away and kept returning quizzes to the students who remained in class.

What I Wanted to Say and Do:

Had I been more inclined to be unkind, I would have turned to this student, who has had a habit of coming to my class late and leaving early and not being particularly well prepared at any time, and said, "And that's why you're going to wind up with a 'D' for this semester."

Planning Ahead

We had been working on doing some prewriting activities for the final essay of the semester in my developmental writing classes. Not horribly complicated stuff. Just getting some ideas down on paper for use in the rough draft. We'd been at it for about an hour, and I suggested that most of the information needed for a response to the assignment was now on the sheets of paper in front of them. I then asked them to take what we had previously discussed about organization and write an outline for the rough draft. I thought I would get some solid attempts at putting together a framework for an essay, but I have to admit that my favorite came from one of the football players. His outline, preserved in its original form:

• intro
• body
• body
• body
• conlusion [sic]

As one of my colleagues stated, this student certainly seems to have caught on to how things work in a writing class. Unsurprisingly, his final draft was, to be generous, a bit of a mess and rather tough to follow. Makes you wonder how he went wrong with a structure like the one above.

Spiritual Awakening

The assignment was a relatively simple one. I asked students to watch a movie or television show, select a specific group of people depicted on that show or in the movie, and then explain what a viewer's impression of that group would be based upon how it was depicted. I did suggest that it might be more interesting to choose a group of which the student was not a member.

The students (all of them in my developmental writing classes) made some intriguing choices: serial killers (Dexter), Alaskans (The Proposal), gypsies or "pikeys" (Snatch), pirates (One Piece), married men (Old School), bosses (The Office), snipers (Enemy at the Gates), even Jedis (Star Wars Episode II: The Attack of the Clones). A few faltered in the explanation of how the group was depicted, but it was only a rough draft, so I expect the final drafts will likely be stronger and have more examples and other details.

One, however, stood out not only for the group chosen for discussion but also for a couple of astonishing statements. The students is a tall, athletic Latino. I have reason to suspect that he might be religious given the brochures for the Latter Day Saints that I've seen in his notebook. I would never have suspected that he would choose Pineapple Express as the movie and potheads as the group. The overall essay was strong for a rough draft, but when I read the following statements in the introduction, I have to admit that I was pretty shocked: "People are very judgmental nowadays and they will try to determine the type of person you are by any little thing that they see. For instance people that smoke Marijuana are looked at upon in a very bad way just because they smoke a natural herb that God created for us." In the conclusion, he returned to the same idea: "Potheads are not bad people, they smoke a natural herb that was placed here by God. Humans don't add any chemicals or change the material to make what they want. It is a natural plant and you can pick it and smoke it instantly, other drugs need to be played around with to get the final result, but that's why marijuana is not bad." Yes, I preserved his grammatical errors in the quote, not to mention his apparent lack of knowledge of how people...um..."use" marijuana.

I know I probably shouldn't be shocked that there's a Christian rationalization for pot smoking. People can probably justify almost anything under the umbrella of religious faith. It just seemed so out of character for this young man. He states  in his essay that he doesn't smoke pot (although he has friends who do) and I suspect that to be the case, but I would have never considered him to be a supporter of marijuana use. He even defended potheads as being more goal-oriented that people typically give them credit for being.

I feel like I learn something astonishing with almost every set of papers I read these days.

Other Teachers Will Understand

I had complained to the Critical Reasoning and Writing class during the next-to-last week of summer school that they weren't doing a particularly good job of introducing the material they were using from outside sources. I was getting parenthetical citations with last names and little else, and I suggested that readers needed to have the ability to judge the credibility of the sources in an essay by knowing something more about the sources than just the author's last name. We even had a little practice during classtime to remind them of this skill that they should have either developed or honed in their College Writing classes.

I took up a set of essays a day or two later. I was hopeful that some of them would have noted my frustration from our in-class discussion. Many of them had done a better job, to be honest. However, while I was reading and grading them over the weekend, I came across this particularly egregious example of how some people just never seem to know when to quit:

"In an essay in The Civil Mind compiled by Margaret Early Whitt and Janet L. Bland called 'A New Campus Crusade' by Keith Naughton, Mary Sue Coleman, the president of the University of Michigan, proposed a new process in choosing prospective students for the university."

How much of that do you really need to know at that particular moment in the essay itself and how much of it could be saved for the Works Cited list where it would look just a tiny bit less...well, clunky and ham-handed? At least, the student was consistent. Every single source was introduced by giving the author's name and the title of the article and where it was located. Probably one-eighth of the essay or so was taken up with these kinds of introductions (and they weren't even saved for only the first reference in the paper either. No, they had to reappear every single time that same source was used.) Thankfully, the student saved the date of publication and the type of source (Print, Web, etc.) for the Works Cited list.

Of course, I marked his grade down on that particular element, and I'm certain he was very disappointed and perhaps even angry. He had actually been one of the few who had done the citations (mostly) correctly for the first essay, but I guess the ones who really don't need the help often think that they aren't doing enough to demonstrate that they "get it."

Where Do You Start?

As a writing teacher, sometimes I get sentences and paragraphs and even entire essays that are just so astonishing in their inability to convey information clearly that I have to save them and share them. The paragraph below, written for a developmental writing class, is the one that stood out this semester as the worst offender. The assignment was a relatively simple one. Students had to describe a place that held some special significance to them. I expected there to be not only physical description of this place but some attempt to explain why it was so significant, what sort of history they had with the places they chose.

I have preserved the sentence structure and the spelling and all other aspects of the original except for the line spacing (which had its own issues). This was the final draft's concluding paragraph. Yes, it is all just one sentence. I had written on the rough draft that the student should try to sum up, as best he could, why the place he had chosen to discuss meant so much to him.

"In conclusion, Angel Stadium means a lot me and it will always be a place of merit and it's a place that will always have importance to me and it will never be a place to I can hang out because of the memories that I have at the stadium and it will never leave my mind and the memories i have of game seven of the world series and it can be a good thing it can also be a bad thing but I see it as a good thing because it will always be in my mind and that is why it has merit and importance in my life."

I just couldn't think of what to tell the student about how to make that conclusion better. Unfortunately, he stopped coming to class at about the same time, so I never had a chance to return the graded paper and talk to him about how he might try to improve his writing skills. That means that someone--hopefully, someone more patient and talented than I am--will be helping him out in the same class next semester.