Comments and Contacting Me

Hi everybody,

Quick administrative note.  Lately I've had to take a stronger stance in removing comments that do not add to a given thread.  This frequently happens when somebody discovers the blog for the first time and wants to use the opportunity to say "Hey, have you seen this yet?" and provide me with a link.  This is not typically what I'd think of as spam, I think it's just overenthusiasm.

Still, though, the rule continues to apply - add something to the discussion.  If you want to provide a link, make it a relevant one.

For those that want to share links and have no way to contact me, I've added a link directly in the sidebar over there.  It's also fairly easy to get me via the Contact page.  I do see links when people send them to me that way, I have a number of regulars who constantly send me stuff.  So don't be afraid.

Fair enough?  I feel bad deleting comments that come from legit Shakespeare fans, but it's also not right for me to judge one worthy of deletion and one worthy of keeping.  So typically they all go.

- SG

Teaching With Shakespeare : A Game

Ok, for this game you are stranded on a desert island with a young child, and it is now your job to provide an education for this child.  For maximum points you must meaningfully introduce as many subjects as you can to your student.

Here's the catch - the only book you have to teach with is a First Folio.  You are allowed to supplement with visual aids, but only to the extent that you could create them with whatever rudimentary means might be at your disposal, such as scratching in the sand with a stick.  Nothing too complicated.

Easy example : You can teach poetry, by showing multiple examples of meter and rhyme scheme.

Harder example : Geography.   You could do a pretty good job of plotting where Prospero's island is, simply by looking at the description of the ship's return from Claribel's wedding in Tunisia.  (This is where I see no way around having to draw out a globe and start pointing to various places.)  There's actually an island that claims to have been Shakespeare's inspiration, based entirely on this method (given that there's no way Shakespeare could have ever been there).

What else can you come up with?  How about math?  Other than the dividing up of King Lear's soldiers I'm trying to think of how many math problems Shakespeare may have written out for us.

Science?  Given how much science has changed in 400 years this would be a tricky one, and it's not Shakespeare's fault.

History?  The case of Julius Caesar is probably the most well known.  How many kids graduate from high school never truly knowing what facts about Caesar's assassination are true, and which were created by Shakespeare?

How about spelling, or for that matter reading in the first place?  That would be interesting.  I bet with some study you could make a good list of words that are spelled in multiple different ways, and then use that to work on a basic phonetics lesson.

You are also welcome to make the case for more advanced classes such as "debating", "politics", "psychology" and so on.

How To Categorize Shakespeare

Here's a question that comes up in my life a lot.  We talk about Shakespeare here. That's easy.  But when I go and add the site to various boards and services, inevitably I'm asked to place it into a category.

So, what's our category?

Art?  Education?  Books and Literature?  Theatre?  Entertainment?  History?

None of those is a perfect answer.  I often end up putting us into Education, because when I look at the big mission of the site it is about discussing Shakespeare and hence learning about Shakespeare.  But education is not always a very big category and doesn't get much traffic, so I feel like to just relegate us over there is not giving the site enough credit.

Curious to people's thoughts.  Of course, some sites do offer the opportunity to place multiple tags of your own creation, which is fine - then I can add the actual word Shakespeare and the rest becomes secondary.

But for those cases where you need to pick a single category, what are we?  Think of it from the perspective of the incoming potential audience - they're in category X, and they see Shakespeare Geek, what would their expectations be about the site?  And would we meet those expectations?

Thanks as always for helping to make the site better!