A new school year is underway! As always, you’re doing the most important work on earth. As always, we’re with you. And we’re getting ready to share a whole new wave of support for you and your classrooms. Exciting stuff! Stay tuned. What’s in store for the Folger teaching family, including YOU? Where have we… Continue Reading »
Posts Categorized: Summer-academy
Dale Dworak, an alum of the Teaching Shakespeare Institute 2016, teaches history at a public high school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. After spending four intense weeks at the Folger, he rethought how he’d been teaching primary source documents and informational texts. We’re sharing with you one of his brilliant ideas for connecting students to the words… Continue Reading »
On April 23rd 2016, while the whole world seemed to be celebrating the life and work of William Shakespeare for the 400th anniversary of his death, I was in mourning. I did not expect to be. After all, experiencing grief for the four-century-dead is certainly what Claudius would call, “obsequious sorrow.” However, I wasn’t so… Continue Reading »
Every year, Wildwood School, the independent progressive school in Los Angeles where I teach, hosts an event called Hamlet Night put on by the current junior class. It’s the culminating project of the junior year, the apotheosis of the three months the students have put into reading, performing, studying, and writing about the Bard’s most… Continue Reading »
I am an English teacher because of my English teachers. What dedication I have I learned from a man who had Paradise Lost taken off of his syllabus but came into work an hour early, each day, to teach it to a small group of curious readers. What patience I have I learned from… Continue Reading »
I have a confession to make. As a high school English teacher, I have not always been obsessed with teaching Shakespeare. Yikes! I know that makes me sound sacrilegious as a lover of language, but after teaching American literature for so long, I was always drawn to the lyrical language of F. Scott Fitzgerald… Continue Reading »
My Google calendar tells me that it’s been exactly 193 days since I said goodbye to my Folger Summer Academy cohort on a Friday afternoon filled with DC humidity, wine, conversation, and a palpable sense of loss. Having spent nearly 60 hours together in less than a week, working at Hamlet, meant that I had… Continue Reading »
The week of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Summer Academy challenged, inspired, and intellectually filled me; it was exciting to be surrounded by people who light up at the sound of iambic pentameter and are thrilled to talk about Shakespeare twelve hours a day and then some. I returned home brimming with new ideas, and I… Continue Reading »
This summer I had the privilege of participating in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute: Summer Academy. During this week-long intensive program, I was given multiple strategies for teaching Shakespeare’s Hamlet and other Shakespearean works. I learned that I should allow the students to perform scenes according to how they interpret the language…. Continue Reading »
This past July, I had the great fortune of attending the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Summer Academy in Washington, D.C. There, I attended lectures given by master teachers and scholars; I played the part of the Ghost in a performance of Act One of Hamlet; I held—in these two hands—Walt Whitman’s copy of the… Continue Reading »
