Page 35 of In Her Own Way
Cries of “eww” and “gross” permeated the classroom, but Jessica just laughed. “Worksheet time.” She handed out theassignment. She’d already perused her first three classes’ work and had seen that several of them had used the term transgender in some of their adjective examples. Mission accomplished. She felt good about her subtle lesson, but time would tell if there would be any fallout. People were so ignorantly sensitive to things they simply didn’t understand.
When the timer went off, making everyone, including Jessica, jump, the worksheets were handed in, and the students knew that the next, bigger lesson was about to begin.
“Have you ever talked to yourself?” Jessica asked before shining the next lesson on the whiteboard. Head nods and affirmations answer her question. “Me, too,” Jessica said. “Just this morning at home, I had an entire conversation with myself about what to bring for lunch today.”
“Did you work it out, Ms. B?”
Jessica laughed. “I did, I did. And it was delicious.” She waited a beat and then said, “A soliloquy is when someone basically says their thoughts out loud. In a play, it’s a way for the audience to hear what the character is thinking.”
She clicked open to the first page of her Hamlet lesson plan, waited for the groans to subside, and read, “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” The first few lines of Hamlet’s third act soliloquy shone on the whiteboard.
She nodded to Jack, who was the first assigned reader. She liked having her students read aloud. It was a way for her not only to check their reading skills but also to gauge confidence or nerves. It was difficult to read in front of your peers, and Jessica hoped to help them get used to being vocal in a carefully controlled environment.
As he read, Jessica made a note on her class roster. Jack was fine. She halted him, asked another student to read, then a third. All three were confident readers. Eventually, she’d get through every one of her students. This kind of analysis not only caughtproblems students might be having, but it was also a good thing to mention in the ubiquitous parent-teacher meetings that PUA seemed to have. She’d been to more of those meetings in the first quarter at her new school than she’d been to in her entire eight years in her two Cincinnati schools.
“Who wants to take a crack at what Hamlet’s going on about?”
“Does this guy want to die or something?” Sophia asked without first raising her hand. And that was okay. She hadn’t been disruptive. Jessica would make sure classroom order was maintained, but not at the expense of their learning and sharing of ideas.
“What makes you say that?” Jessica asked.
“Honestly, this language is weird and kind of hard to follow,” Sophia said and then pointed to the whiteboard. “But right there he says, ‘To die, to sleep.’”
“Ahh,” Jessica said and read the next two lines off the board. “To sleep: perchance to dream: Ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?”
Several hands went up. Jessica nodded for Ezra to speak. “I think at first, this guy thinks dying is kind of like sleeping, right? Like, hey, when I die, I’m just gonna sleep and dream. But then he seems to second-guess it when he kind of says, ‘Wait a minute. What kind of dreams am I going to get?’”
Jessica was about to respond when a dozen hands went up. She nodded to quiet Maya. “What does ‘there’s the rub’ mean?”
“The wordrubbasically means obstacle.”
Maya’s hand went back up. “So, he’s saying something like, ‘so here’s the obstacle to my thought. I could have nightmares and not just sweet cotton candy dreams.’”
“Well said,” Jessica nodded. “All of you.” Even more hands went up, but she ignored them momentarily. “What does theopening phrase, ‘to be or not to be’, mean? I know you’ve all heard it.”
The students looked at each other, perplexed until Jayden said, “Oh, shit, Ms. B. Does it mean he’s thinking about unaliving himself?”
Jessica simply nodded.
“Whoa,” more than one student said. “That’s dark,” someone in the back added.
“This play was written in the early sixteen hundreds,” Jessica said. “Hamlet is a prince. And life is kind of overwhelming for him at the moment. He’s reaching a breaking point.”
“What happened to him?” Sophia asked.
Jessica leaned forward on the podium. “I guess we’ll have to read the play and find out, won’t we?”
Good-natured jeers were aimed at Sophia, who just shook it off and said, “Ms. B would have made us read it anyway.”
Jessica nodded her head in agreement and then settled the students down with a hand gesture. She outlined their assignment, reminding them that all assignments were listed on their online class page and also on the calendar, so there were no excuses.
“We will be watching some scenes, but not the entire play. And I caution you against simply watching videos and not reading. There is something to be said for digging into the literature. Reading Hamlet will help you get good at reading the ‘weird language’ which will, in turn, lay a solid foundation for your future English courses, so no skimping.”
She thanked the three students who read that day, wanting to make sure they understood that she appreciated their efforts.
The bell rang to end the class, and as her period seven students were filing out, her period eight students were coming in. It was then that her supervisor slipped into the room. Oh,shit. Had her subtletranslesson already hit the fan? Damn, she’d hoped for at least twenty-four hours before she’d need to update her resume.
“How’s the literary magazine coming?” Marjorie Whitaker asked. “Mr. Herrera wants something out by Thanksgiving.”
