Will “blended learning” - the combination of home and school-based learning we’ll have to adapt to after the summer here in Scotland - signal the end for Shakespeare?
Every year, I get to reread some of my favourite books and plays with classes of inquisitive young people, and share my passion with them. It is one of the greatest joys of teaching English to get stuck into a big, chunky story. I like to refresh my text choices every few years to stop myself growing stale, but no matter how many times I re-excavate the stories of Inspector Goole and Ponyboy Curtis and Boxer and Boo Radley and Hamlet, one thing remains constant: the characters are always fresh and alive to the pupils.
The school closures and subsequent reopenings have irreversibly changed the realities of education, but could they rattle the very core of every English teacher’s practice? If we are moving to a blended learning system, with fractured timetables and splintered classes, is it practical or reasonable or fair to try to teach the long, complex plays and novels we have grown to love and rely on?
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I am an advocate for teaching Shakespeare - I know there are plenty who disagree - having been quite frankly terrified of him as a new teacher. Last month, one of my senior pupils emailed to thank me for helping her with Shakespeare, saying that, although she “hated reading”, I had encouraged her to “love writing about Shakespeare”.
But I’m not so sure I would back myself to do such a good job with half the class, half the time. It’s a communal thing. You need that time together in class to laugh at the bizarre pantomime of the plays, to puzzle over the strange language, to imagine how the actors and the set would convey the drama of each scene. It’s also a time-consuming choice. You probably need about seven hours with a class just to read Hamlet from beginning to end, never mind getting into any deep textual analysis or activities.
Similar concerns arise with the thought of teaching long novels remotely. Obviously, for some, the solution will be that pupils do all of the reading at home and then work on related tasks during class time. But this ignores the unfortunate truth that lots of young people will struggle to manage this, to concentrate for long enough, to even have the ability to finish a book unsupervised. If we expect all pupils to complete books individually, some individuals will fail and the attainment gap will grow.
Recently, a new Twitter account was established to encourage collaboration between English teachers in Scotland. It asked the community about plans to use shorter texts in reaction to the proposed model of blended learning, and there was a keen response. Lots of teachers got in touch with ideas for short stories and short non-fiction pieces they are planning to use. And this might just be the way the English curriculum goes over the next year or two.
This doesn’t need to be a damaging thing. Access to high-quality, short texts with rich analytical options has never been wider. Online magazines and newspapers hold massive archives of writing. And maybe, with the use of audiobooks and clever timetabling, longer texts can still be taught with the same sense of drive as before. But I’m afraid that this year, at least, I’ll be giving Shakespeare a miss - alas, I knew him well.
Alan Gillespie is principal teacher of English at Fernhill School in Glasgow. He tweets @afjgillespie
