The Art Of Saying A Lot About A Little
It's been an unduly long time since my last blog post and there are a number of reasons for that, chief among them the end of my ITT year and subsequent qualification as a teacher. I found myself really busy in the last few weeks of placement and since finishing, my time has largely been spent reflecting, reading and recuperating.
I was inspired to write this after seeing a number of blog posts emerge on Twitter about various topics, all of which a) I found really interesting / useful and b) encouraged me to share something that I felt had quite a positive impact in the classroom. I'm not sure how much of what will follow is likely to be original or innovative: I don't consider myself a pedagogical pioneer. However, if there is something that someone can take away or even if you just find this an enjoyable read, I'll consider it a win.
To offer some background to the post, I'll start by saying that in the final stage of my placement Year 9 were studying Romeo and Juliet, focussing specifically on Romeo's attitude to love. One thing I was really keen to get them doing was saying a lot about a little. Sometimes, I think students deploy quotations without really exploiting the full range of opportunities for analysis which those quotations offer. I want my students to recognise that texts comprise layers of meaning which can be unravelled and I want them to be able to delve into these layers, form their own ideas and opinions as they go and explore multiple perspectives. To that end, I wanted to spend a lesson showing them a method for doing just that.
With my exercise book under the visualiser, I presented students with the following:
After giving them a few seconds to read what was on the board, I explained to them that I had 'exploded' this quotation in the way they normally would with any other quotation. This particular group were a very bright bunch and exploding quotations was something we had looked at together in a previous unit of work just before Christmas, so they were all familiar with the approach.
So far, so good.
I then directed their attention to the four lines branching off from the quotation. This was something they hadn't seen or done before. What was the purpose of these incongruous lines? They were, I said, intended to act as 'bridges' between the quotation and our ideas: essentially, I was trying to get them to make connections between the quotation and the idea in a way that would lend itself nicely to a point of analysis.
I live modelled this next step in order to narrate my thought process and thereby help students understand not just what I was doing but, crucially, how I was doing it. I began with the fact that Romeo uses a metaphor to describe Juliet, by comparing her directly to the sun. OK, I said, so I've identified the technique being used. Is that sufficient? No. I can't just feature spot. I need to think about and discuss why that is relevant or interesting or significant or whatever the case may be. NB: At this point, I wasn't writing anything. I was simply addressing the students and talking to them - or perhaps at them, as I was thinking out loud. This metaphor, in my opinion, illustrates the depth of Romeo's affection for Juliet: he is describing her as something which has connotations of warmth, happiness, radiance, etc. So that is my 'link' between the quotation and the idea. Along the line stretching from the quotation to 'metaphor', I wrote in red pen 'depth of affection'. If, then, I had selected this quote to explore in a piece of writing, I would have my first point of analysis.
Moving round clockwise, we came to 'life-giving'. Again, I wasn't writing anything here because I wanted to focus on conveying my thoughts to the students as a way of illustrating how I had generated this idea. I explained that the sun is the source of life on earth: plants need sunlight to grow and animals, including humans, need plants for food and the oxygen they produce. That Romeo likens Juliet to the very thing from which we derive life is, I suggested, perhaps indicative of the fact that, since meeting her a few scenes previously (mere minutes / hours, within the timeline of the play), she is his sustenance. Such was the strength of their romantic connection at the Capulet ball that Romeo almost feels he needs Juliet in order to survive - a sentiment which Juliet herself expresses towards the end of A1-S5 when she remarks that 'if [Romeo] be married / My grave is like to be my wedding bed'. There is also potentially an argument that, like the sun, Juliet has exerted a gravitational pull so strong that Romeo is drawn to her, even to the point of risking his life by 'o'erperch[ing]' the orchard walls just to be within her orbit. Here, then, is my second 'link' and in red pen along the line from the quotation to 'life-giving', I wrote 'sustenance'. If I was using this quote in a piece of writing, this would be my second point of analysis.
This process continued for the remaining two annotations. When looking at 'beyond reality', I explained that this quotation was one of a number of celestial references which Romeo uses when talking about, or to, Juliet. For him, her beauty is otherworldly: something which cannot be explained using natural - or realistic - language / imagery. That therefore gave me one of my 'link words', so I wrote in red pen 'celestial'. I also suggested that there is a heavenly undertone here, which provided me with a second 'link word' that I added on the other side of the line. For 'light vs dark', I told them that this is a recurring motif throughout the play and this quotation is an extension, or continuation, of that motif which features quite heavily in Romeo's speech during A1-S5 when he first sees Juliet. I think there may also be a sense of duality here: the 'balcony scene', from which this quotation comes, takes place at night so there is a contrast between the public world of the feud that we tend to see during the day and the private world of Romeo and Juliet's idealised love. Both things - the feud and their love - exist within Veronese society but that society has different sides to it. There is also (possibly?) the duality of the Capulet family: namely, a contrast between Juliet and her relatives. In A1-S5, for example, Romeo equates Juliet with 'a snowy dove trooping with crows'. If we operate on the assumption that the 'crows' are members or retainers of her family, Juliet is markedly different from the rest of them, not least because she is purity and peace personified ('dove') whilst the others are representations of darkness and / or death ('crows').
By the end of this sequence, both the students and I had this in our books:
My aim was for students to see that from one quotation, you can extract an awful lot. If it came to using this quotation in an essay, I would have four different things to say and could, realistically, write an entire (lengthy) paragraph on it. Whether you would or not is perhaps a different matter and, given time constraints and what not, it would be sufficient to explore two or even three interpretations but the point still stands. The caveat, I told them, is that this is not the case for all quotations: naturally, some are better than others and so it is important that they are able to identify and select those which they feel they can get the most out of. An analogy I have used in the past is of trying to wring a damp cloth or sponge until there is no moisture left. It's not particularly pleasant but I think it helps to conceptualise something that can otherwise be quite abstract.
The remainder of the lesson was spent completing this same activity but for two different quotations. For the second one, I chose 'It is my lady, O it is my love!' from A2-S2 when Juliet appears at the window. As before, I put my book under the visualiser and students saw this:
This time, I told them I wanted them to connect the quotation to the idea in the same way they had just watched me do. I gave the class a few minutes to see what they came up with and then I took some feedback, adding their 'link words' to my own as they spoke. Eventually, this is what we had:
I was relatively pleased with this and took it as a sign that students knew and understood what they needed to do. It also provided a good opportunity to ask questions like 'why have you chosen that word?' or 'what makes you think that?' and to open a dialogue whereby students justified their decisions, explaining their own thought processes whilst also drawing upon both their knowledge of the play so far and Romeo as a character.
This sort of lesson is easily built upon because in the next, you could get the students to practice by pulling their ideas through into a coherent piece of writing. I would live model this in the first instance because that way, students can see not only how these annotations act as a guide to refer back to during the writing process, e.g. by prompting you to consider what your best piece of analysis might be or whether you have said more than one thing about the particular quotation, but also what good analytical writing looks like.
Before I sign off, I'll say that I used this same activity with a group of Year 10s studying Macbeth and found that it worked quite well there, too. I expect it's something I'll return to and rely on again as I try to encourage students to think about alternative interpretations and say a lot about a little.
If you've made it this far, thanks for reading -
Oli
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