Friday was an average day.
Got up, wrote, walked, ate breakfast, showered, dressed, went to school. It’s pretty much how every day goes. Morning rituals and routines set the day up, get things going the way they are meant to go.
I get to school, do school things, and start a full day teaching. The day goes along just fine. I talk, students listen, I make mistakes, students learn—same same.
Noodles for lunch. Check my personal email. Answer the quiz answers I know, let others answer the ones they know.
The final two periods for the day are year 10 English. We are studying Macbeth. I’m loving it. We have been reading the play out loud, summarising each scene and responding to the things that happen. It is a mixed ability class, encompassing a full range. One of my “strong” kids has checked out—she checked out way before Macbeth—and has told me that she prefers to read alone. What she doesn’t say but is equally evident is that traditional teaching works for her and this isn’t traditional teaching. She wants lectures and structured activities—something there is a time and a place for, just not here and not now. I put it back on her that she can change her learning experience by thinking of others but leave it at that. Now is not the time.
Class gets going with the reading of the final scene.
A struggler who has come a very long way this year nods her head. ‘I knew it had to be a caesarean,’ she says, ‘that’s the only way someone isn’t “born”‘. I smile a knowing smile—I’ve been trying to hide from her the fact that she had guessed a few scenes ago. I wanted her to find it out for herself. Her self-efficacy increases, I ride the wave it creates.
Most folks know that Macbeth is about an ambitious soldier who lets a couple of witch-delivered prophecies go to his head. He’s married to an equally ambitious woman. She goads him into killing King Duncan, who is, unfortunately, staying at their house to celebrate them. The irony of this is not lost on the kids.
The murder draws on a part of Macbeth’s personality that previously served his king well. Now it serves only him. He kills his best friend. Something in him breaks—he starts seeing ghosts. His wife publicly laughs it off and tells everyone ‘he’s had these turns since he was a kid’. Privately, she tells him to pull himself together. I imagine she may even have slapped him, even though there are no stage directions as such.
Things get worse. People are suspicious of the “good and noble” Macbeth. They begin to put the pieces together. He gets more violent. He arranges the murder of an unprotected wife, children and household—an act of strength against his enemy.
His enemy, Macduff, is rightly devastated. ‘All my babies?’ he asks. King Duncan’s son and heir, Malcolm tells him that this is not the time to be overcome with grief—Scotland is suffering. A tyrant is running free. He urges Macduff to use his grief to fuel his anger, to go and avenge the ones he loved so much, to overthrow Macbeth. They go together.
It is Macduff whose mother died giving birth to him, whose stomach was cut open to save the unborn child. It is the year 1000. She cannot survive.
Macbeth has gone back to the occult to find his future. They tell him ‘no one born of a woman can kill you’. He leaves confident that he can only die by natural means. He doesn’t know about Macduff. The witches warned him, but he took their words about Macduff to mean betrayal, not death. Evil is playing with him, leading him astray in cruel ways, as it does. In the end, Macbeth faces his death like the soldier he is, not the man he could have become.
It has been a journey reading this play in class. The outrage, the discussions. Who fault is it? Is Macbeth a victim? What about Lady Macbeth?
Now it is time to land the literary concept of a theme. We start working it out together on the board, putting up a definition and identifying what themes we see in the text. This isn’t our first go at themes, I have mentioned them as we go to prime the pump. The discussion starts with things things we have already discussed. It’s going well. Their confidence is growing.
‘What is another theme?’ I ask.
‘Violence,’ says one of my quieter students.
This is new. We haven’t really talked about the idea of violence for itself. A hand goes up.
‘Mrs B, what if it isn’t just that there is violence in the story? What if reading the book is violent?’ She waits for my reaction. I let the idea land. And run with it. We are off and going somewhere, I’m not sure where but I am sure something important wants to show itself.
The energy in the room lifts. Kids start to contribute more. I keep bringing it back to this idea, asking them over and over variations of, ‘if the reading of this play is a violent experience, what is Shakespeare saying about violence?’
We connect violence with evil, and identify the inevitability of violence. I raise the idea of the witches, throwing out a line hoping to catch something. I still don’t know where we are going but am loving that we are going there together. We are all in the flow of learning.
We’ve talked about the play opening with the witches. ‘Who does the play end with?’ I’m thinking about Malcolm, the new King, a virtuous and good man. ‘What are the final lines?’ I ask. We read them together. Malcolm is saying how God has appointed him to restore Scotland.
Then a voice comes from the back of the room, ‘The play opens with the witches and closes with God.’
I catch my breath. Stop. Let the words sink in.
It is profound—deeply profound.
This lovely, somewhat quirky fellow, of whom I am quite fond, has hit on the key idea, the place we were going, our destination.
I give the idea structure and check that this rings true for our bearer of truth pushing his hair out of his eyes with his hand, smiling shyly while I dance about making a fuss.
Together, this is what we learn:
Evil is an inevitable part of the word. This results in suffering. Even in the face of terrible suffering, our response should be to use that suffering to overcome evil, to use our pain for ultimate good.
The play opens with witches, it ends with God.
Brilliant.
This Writer's Life 