Using Shakespeare’s Othello as a foundation, English 4 students are currently writing an essay choosing from one of three prompts that requires the student to pick a certain character and cite evidence from the play, as well as drawing evidence from other researchers and authors.

“The students will be expected to connect the themes and elements of the play to the universal themes shown in the real world,” English 4 teacher Shannon Glidwell said. “They’ll need to do this in order to support their argument.”

Glidwell hopes that this project will prepare students for writing college papers through the various research aspects about human behavior and ethics that they are being taught.

“We want them to learn the research aspects of the project for the purposes of getting them ready to do research in college,” he said. “It will also get them to look at the human aspect of it as well as the ethics of how people behave, why they make certain choices they do, how some people may be easy to manipulate, and just study the human nature overall.”

With three prompts to choose from, students have a variety of options of what to write about as well as which outside elements or literary sources to use.

“For my paper, I chose to talk about one of the characters and how he is inherently good, and how that affects the play and the meaning as a whole,” senior Anya Khosla said. “I chose that prompt because I felt that it would allow me to really dig deep into the humanistic aspect of the play and express my way of thinking the best.”

Even with the various characters, prompts and themes to write about, the major struggle many students are having is finding sources to support their position. 

“My biggest challenge in creating the essay is finding the best, most relevant research for my project; I mainly use Mackinvia,” senior Hunter Williams said. “I’ve started to look more into different characters’ perception of mine, definitions of archetypes and more to find the evidence that I need.”