Let Students Read the Whole Book |
The first time I ever cracked open a work of William Shakespeare was during my freshman year of high school, when my English teacher assigned “Julius Caesar.” It was awful.
The vocabulary was archaic, the syntax confusing. I couldn’t make sense of Shakespeare’s literary devices, and the relentless political maneuvering was nearly impossible for my 14-year-old mind to track.
But, with the teacher’s help, I fought my way through, page by page, scene by scene, until I not only finished the tragedy, but appreciated it—the powerful rhetoric, the interplay of poetry and prose, the ominous imagery and macabre foreshadowing.
When I was done, I felt as if I’d just scaled Mount Everest, and a lifelong love of literature and learning was born.
Had my teacher assigned only an excerpt from “Julius Caesar”—or a shorter work, such as a sonnet—I wouldn’t have experienced that sense of accomplishment or intellectual growth. I would have........