Ready to begin!

Tonight finds me feverishly preparing for the introduction to our Shakespeare unit.  It is both my favorite thing and the thing I dread most. You may wonder about this dichotomy.  I adore this unit, and the opening activities are fantastic and really set the tone. However,  it is such a high-stress organizational task! I'm trying to remember everything we learned last year when we did this for the first time, which was a lot. But I've slept since then, and I can't shake the nagging feeling that I'm forgetting really important things. I guess tomorrow will tell the tale!

The study of Shakespeare in general is very stress-inducing for me. Most of my students have never read or had any experience with Shakespeare. This unit will be their first exposure to something which will continue as a major part of the English curriculum through both high school and college.  The impression they leave my classroom with about Shakespeare and his work may very well set the tone for every experience they will have with his work from now on! That's a tall order. I feel a tremendous responsibility to make sure I do The Bard justice!

I plan on blogging each night about how the unit is going, and linking my student blogs here as well. Oh, and did I mention that the unit is also a pilot BYOD program?  This is either going to be totally awesome,  or a total disaster! I'm (obviously) hoping for the former,  but time will tell! I hope you will follow our journey here, and perhaps find inspiration from it. After all, goals don't get much more audacious than teaching Hamlet to 8th graders,  right? I'm figuring if we can make this a success, everything else should be like a cakewalk.

Ah well.  The longer I spend typing here, the less I get done before bedtime!  "And enterprises of great pith and moment/ With this regard their currents turn awry./ And lose the name of action" (III.i.88-90).