Teaching Colleagues, My heart is bursting, bursting for the students and teachers of Stoneman Douglas High School. I ache for the dead and the families and friends and students of the dead. I ache for the time that the healing will take. I ache for those who won’t ever heal. I ache that school invasions… Continue Reading »
Woo Hoo! This is the birthday and deathday week. And this could be the week of a tiny bit of creative mayhem in your classes. On Saturday, the 23rd, the Folger will host an international live streaming event—called The Wonder of Will LIVE — from our historic Paster Reading Room. Broadcast live via C-SPAN2 and… Continue Reading »
A Big Announcement this week, teaching colleagues! We’re totally psyched. We want you to . . . JOIN US! THREE LIVE-STREAMED MASTER CLASSES FROM THE FOLGER! Join us, your colleagues down the hall, and teachers from across the country for a series of three live-streamed-from-the-Folger Master Classes focused on three plays you teach. One… Continue Reading »
Months and months ago—sometime in June 2015—we asked all of you to give us a few suggestions about a couple of different topics. And you, busy teachers that you are, responded big-time to two questions in particular: What should we rename the blog then known as Making A Scene? What is a must-read… Continue Reading »
Because we’re headed toward Thanksgiving, and because we are thankful for you and what you do always, I want to share a list that was my entire keynote at the Stratford (Ontario) Festival’s annual fall education conference last month. My list/talk was—of course—about teachers. PEGGY O’BRIEN’S TEN ABSOLUTE TRUTHS ABOUT TEACHERS You have the… Continue Reading »
By Peggy O’Brien In our June issue of BardNotes, I posed four questions to y’all. Three of them were requesting your advice about our blog and some new directions it might take. I snuck in the fourth question, purely for my own selfish purpose. I asked you what I should read this summer. … Continue Reading »
By Peggy O’Brien At St. Mary’s College of Maryland’s 2015 commencement, Michael Tolaydo—both in honor of his long and distinguished career there and in honor of the graduating class—was asked to send the graduates off into their futures with some Shakespeare. We share it with you here because he is an important part of the… Continue Reading »
[getty src=”3361122?et=oWkEYkudRFV-mX3XFa3atA&sig=y7PT5lyOZUSlXwRFO8bMRwEry9eIyD-qEm_xsmoOFyE=&caption=true” width=”433″ height=”594″] By Peggy O’Brien I am writing today—on Martin Luther King’s real birthday—because his presence in the world and in my life had so much to do with why I became a teacher, and because the words that he left with us continue to challenge and inspire so many of us. … Continue Reading »
Scott Van Wye, a student of Richard Phillipy at Lawrence Central High School in Indianapolis, won first prize at the 31st annual English-Speaking Union National Shakespeare Competition on May 5. Scott performed a speech by Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing and a cold reading from The Tempest in addition to a sonnet. The competition was held at Lincoln Center… Continue Reading »
Yeats is the guy who said that education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. What I think about all the time is how that fire gets lit. What’s the spark that turned you on to Shakespeare? Who or what lit that fire or that fuse for you? [getty… Continue Reading »
