As the school year is coming to an end, students in English 1 are starting their final unit more than 400 years in the making as students take a dive into Romeo and Juliet.
“I think it also teaches them the importance of communication because a lot of the poor choices that Romeo and Juliet made could have been avoided if they had only had honest and open communication with their families,” English teacher Shannon Smith said. “I think it also teaches kids or people in general, really, that decisions should be reached with a balance of logic and emotion, that when we rely simply on our impulses and our feelings to determine the path that we want to take in life, that the results don’t often end in a positive way.”
Finding this unit interesting, Romeo and Juliet is a new type of reading for freshman Aadya Jain.
“I think it’s pretty interesting reading classical playwrights and the uniqueness of them,” Jain said.” Personally, I don’t think I’m that interested in it because I would rather learn about something else, but I guess it’s part of the curriculum, so I kind of have to. But the most interesting part would be the ending. I feel like it was quite interesting and odd for a playwright to have that scene, but yeah.”
Annotating the story as she read through it definitely made it easier for freshman Hadley Chandler to understand.
“What I did was I would read every scene and I would document any kind of figurative language, any kind of foreshadowing, anything like that,” Chandler said. “And then I also just kind of summarize each scene so that when we go back for our Socratic seminar, I have some references to look on to.”
In her experiences as a teacher, it’s uncommon for students to want to read a classic, but for Smith, Romeo and Juliet opens the opportunity to try it out.
“I don’t think, would choose to read classics for enjoyment, but by studying it, we can break down some of the language barriers,” Smith said. “Kids can understand that there are actually some funny and lighthearted and entertaining elements of the play as well. And then when we pair it with some of the different film adaptations of it, kids are able to kind of visualize what maybe they weren’t understanding by just reading it. And ultimately, I hope that they come away from it having learned some lessons that maybe they can avoid in their own lives.”
