I'm introducing The Taming of the Shrew to my sophomores, and am prepping them by focusing on the themes in the play first. Last week, one of their questions to answer was to explain how they view gender roles in a relationship, and whether or not love is necessary for marriage. During the course of reading their answers, I learned two important things.
1) Teenagers are extremely jaded about marriage. That was not terribly surprising, as at least half of them have divorced parents or have only known one parent, but it was interesting to see how they expressed these opinions.
2) I have one student who has said three words to me all year and is rarely in attendance, who is actually quite bright when he shows up, who, for this assignment, wrote something incredibly poignant. Unfortunately, I do not have his paper in front of me so I cannot cite it verbatim, but he compared a relationship to a house of cards: All pieces have to work together in a very specific way or everything will fall apart. I was floored. Most of my students don't even know what an analogy is; much less can they make one that is so appropriate and complex.
It's things like that that make me wish I could just randomly pull kids into a quiet corner and say "You're awesome." It's moments like that that make me forget about all the bad in the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment