Tragicomic Fiction Author

Category: Teaching

Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet: A Reflection on the Frustrating Experience of Teaching Shakespeare to High School Students

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east and Juliet is the sun.

Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet

When I recently gave my Year 10 English class a selection of movies to choose from for their upcoming film study, I was surprised when the overwhelming majority of them (and not just girls) picked Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. So far in my teaching career I’ve steered clear of Shakespeare, mostly because I’ve found students struggle enough with the vagaries of contemporary English — without introducing the confusion of an archaic, four-hundred-year-old dialect.

My reluctance was borne out when after watching the film, the overwhelming majority of the class were of the opinion that they hated it.

“That was the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen,” said one student.

“Totally gay,” ventured another.

“I didn’t understand anything they said,” said several more. “Can we watch something else?”

High on Shakespearean love poetry, I was unsympathetic to their cause. “No! I gave you a choice. I warned you about the language and still, this is what you chose. It’s your own fault — we’re not going back now.”

So for the last couple of weeks we’ve taken a closer look at ‘the greatest love story ever told’. While I don’t think I’ve managed to turn any of the haters around yet, I’m fairly certain I’ve at least managed to increase the general level of understanding.

Anyway, I’ve enjoyed it, and that’s important (trying to teach content that you’re not interested in yourself can become very tedious very quickly). As an introduction to Shakespeare for the beginner, I highly rate Luhrmann’s version, released in 1996. It gets stick from Shakespeare purists because there’s nothing remotely subtle about it — Luhrmann doesn’t really do subtle — and the whole production is completely over the top.

For instance, if there was any doubt that all the guns that are waved about onscreen are supposed to be modern representations of bladed weapons, Luhrmann gives us close up shots of the guns with their model names engraved into them — Sword, Dagger, Rapier etc. — just to make sure the representation is painfully clear.

And to ensure there’s no confusion between members of the two feuding families, the differences between them are made blatantly obvious. The Montague boys are loud and raucous; dressed in unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts and driving a bright yellow convertible, their arrival is accompanied by grinding rock music.

The dark and sinister Capulets, on the other hand, wear tailored suits with waistcoats and fancy shoes and drive a dark blue saloon, their presence announced by fluid strains of Latino style surf guitar.

But that’s exactly why it’s so great for newbies. There’s no need to understand anything the characters say because all the other visual and aural cues make it clear what’s going on in the story.

It also helps that the acting is tremendous — Leonardo DiCaprio totally inhabits the role of Romeo, and while Claire Danes might be a little less convincing as Juliet, it’s only because Leo is so good. The performances of the supporting cast are also uniformly excellent. If you’ve never seen it, there’s plenty worse ways to spend two hours of your life.

Teenagers are a tough crowd though. Not even the tragic ending where Romeo drinks poison and Juliet shoots herself was enough to sway them. “Should’ve been more blood,” they all reckoned.

“Isn’t that what all girls want?” I asked. “A boy who’s willing to die for them?”

“What use is a boyfriend if he’s dead?” came the reply.

It’s hard to argue with that.

This week we’re getting up close and personal with the infamous ‘balcony scene’. Can one of the greatest romantic encounters in the history of storytelling melt the stone-cold cynical hearts of the type of people who routinely begin and end relationships via Messenger and who think that getting married to someone the day after you meet them for the first time is stupid?

I’m not holding my breath.

Poor Shakespeare. Love ain’t what it used to be.

Are you a fan of Romeo and Juliet? Why or why not? Let me know in the comments.


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What Friends Are For, by J.B. Reynolds

A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.

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Woolly Socks

With much of the globe seemingly lurching from one crisis to the next, it’s not for the first time that I feel blessed that life in my small corner of the world is, for the most part, a little bit dull. Now that winter is upon us, the most difficult decision I’ve found myself making is whether or not my desire to have warm toes in the morning is worth turning the fan heater on for. Yes equals toasty tootsies, but a bigger power bill at the end of the month. No equals… a pair of woolly socks. It’s hardly life-changing stuff.

Woolly Socks
Woolly socks and a coffee? What more could a person want?

Socks and Coffee Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

Oh, yeah, now we’re talkin’.

Socks, Coffee and Books Image by FotoRieth from Pixabay

My children have gone back to school, and despite the not infrequent pleas of “I hate school! It’s so boring!” and “Turn the heater on! My toes are cold!” they’ve settled back into the swing of things remarkably well. Life got a bit too loose during the lockdown and they’ve all benefited from the return to a more structured daily routine.

I’ve also returned to my school, and there’s something else to be thankful for. It’s wonderful to see all the smiling faces, teenagers and teachers alike, but the most interesting thing that’s happened since my return is that the textbooks I ordered from the Ministry of Education to be sent out to my students during lockdown finally arrived… on Friday… in my classroom… two months after I ordered them and almost a month after lockdown ended. 

I shouldn’t complain. A free textbook is a free textbook, and for the Ministry of Education to be a mere two months late in their delivery of a promised service is practically unheard of. But it would be hyperbole to describe the outcome as an exciting one.

However, when I compare that to the excitement of joining the unemployment queue, or sleeping in my car, or fearing for my life because of the colour of my skin, it helps put things in perspective. Yes, at this point in time I’m certainly thankful that my life is as mundane as it is. There’s a certain beauty in boring. For the moment, at least, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

What are you feeling thankful for at this point in time? Let me know in the comments.


My Writing Progress

In other news, I’ve finished the first draft of the sequel to Taking the Plunge. Hemingway said the first draft of anything is shit and my manuscript is no exception to that rule, but I’m pretty sure there’s a decent story buried in there somewhere. I’ve been through it chapter by chapter and made a looooooong list of things that need improvement. Now it’s on with the hard graft of writing the second draft.


FREE BOOK!

What Friends Are For, by J.B. Reynolds

A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.

GET YOUR FREE BOOK >>

Overworked and Underpaid

On Wednesday 29th May 2019, there was a national teacher’s strike here in Aotearoa. It was reportedly the largest ever example of industrial action in our history, and the first time members of both the primary and secondary teachers unions had taken combined action. More than 50,000 teachers across the country were involved.

I attended a march in the city of Whangarei. Multiple hundreds of teachers and supporters marched in a long ragged line through the centre of the city to a rally on the eastern edge of town. We got lucky with the weather — it was a beautiful day, and the march was fun. I got to catch up with a bunch of my friends and colleagues from other schools, and there was a real sense of solidarity as we marched, waving signs and chanting. 

overworked and underpaid
“Two, four, six, eight; we just want to educate!”

It seems a little sad to me that I’ve just had my forty-fourth birthday and it’s possibly the only protest action I’ve ever taken. I say possibly because I have the vaguest memories of student protests at Otago University when I was attending in the mid-nineties. There seemed to be annual protests about fee increases at the time, but my memories are so vague that I’m not sure whether I actually participated in any of them or whether I was just aware of them happening around me. I can’t pretend I was the most politically active of students, nor the most dedicated, and there’s every possibility that my experience of the protests came through the lens of a beer glass and the window of the local pub.

Since it was a combined primary and secondary teachers strike and my wife was working, I dropped the twins off at their grandparents and took my daughter with me. I was proud of her, and of the fact that she could be there with me and get a taste of collective action at such a young age.

Only a few days earlier we had the second national day of student strikes against climate change. As teachers, our reasons for striking are the usual ones — we’re overworked and underpaid — and they seem somewhat petty when compared to the existential threat of climate change, but the reality is that we all have our lives to live. In a world of increasing temperatures, weather extremes and rising sea levels, we all still have to earn a living so we can feed our families and keep a roof over our heads — until there’s some radical reorganisation of our social, economic and political structures anyway.

I do think these protests signal a change in the social landscape, and a positive one at that. While protesting against climate change doesn’t suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, just as protesting against poor pay doesn’t suddenly fill one’s pockets with fat rolls of hundred dollar bills, one thing it does do is make people sit up and pay attention. I think there’s a slowly growing awareness (perhaps painfully slow, on a global scale, but growing nonetheless) that the status quo is not a viable option for the planet or humanity’s place on it.

If that all seems a little morbid, then my apologies. I didn’t mean it to — it just came out that way. Really, I’m an optimist, and despite the doomscrollers and naysayers, I think we, as a species, will figure things out.

Been on any protests lately? What was your experience? Let me know in the comments.


FREE BOOK!

What Friends Are For

A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.

GET YOUR FREE BOOK >>

Movie Review: Suicide Squad (2016)

Suicide Squad (2016) Movie Review
Worst. Movie. Ever?

A review of David Ayer’s 2016 movie, Suicide Squad

On Monday, I took a group of 33 Year 10 Media Studies students to see the latest DCEU superhero movie, Suicide Squad. Over the past few weeks, we have been “studying” the superhero genre. I place the word studying in inverted commas because as yet, I am still unsure as to whether we have done anything other than watch a bunch of superhero movies. Year 10 students can be challenging, and in my experience, many of them seem to have an aversion to writing. In fact, many of them seem to have an aversion to school, which makes the concept of such things as “studying” problematic.  Anyway, we do what we can, and considering this is the first time I have done anything in class with the superhero genre, I feel it’s been reasonably successful. It’s impossible to please everyone and certainly, there’s room for improvement, but most of the students seem to have enjoyed it.

Like anything we teachers do with our students that requires leaving the school grounds and venturing out into the real world, organising this trip took a lot of photocopying. I’m not at all sure what percentage of a tree goes into creating a standard, crisp, white sheet of A4 photocopy paper, so I can’t say exactly how many trees had to die so that my students could go to the movies, but in a warming world overflowing with carbon-dioxide where we need every tree we can get, it seemed excessive.

The movie theatre is only a few blocks from school, and I had organised for us to walk there. When I awoke on Monday morning, I was somewhat concerned about this, as it was pouring with rain at my house. However, as I drove through the rolling country hills on my way to school, listening to David Sedaris’s audiobook of Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owlsthe grey clouds parted to reveal water-washed sunlight and a sky that blued from baby to periwinkle as it approached the horizon. It was a beautiful thing. What was even more remarkable, considering the volatility of winter weather here in Northland, was that by the time I got to school to make the final arrangements for our movie trip, the sky and the sun were still there.

At 9:00 am, my students gathered outside my classroom. I ticked their names off my roll and then handed a copy of my roll to the office so that the correct symbol could be placed next to their names on the student management system and their other teachers would know not to expect them in class for the first 3 lessons of the day, and then we walked. Oh, how we walked. We walked in an orderly line. We walked smiling and chatting happily. We got lucky with the weather; the sun shone brightly, the breeze blew gently, and the birds sang sweetly. No one got hit by a car crossing the road, no one got lost, and no one tripped over an uneven lip in the concrete footpath and scraped their knee, requiring use of the first aid kit I had brought with me just in case. 

Isn’t this supposed to be a Suicide Squad (2016) movie review?

Yeah, yeah, I’m getting there. Once at the theatre, we bought popcorn and sugary treats and filed in to watch the movie. The movie itself is an unholy muddled mess, the worst I have seen since watching Jupiter Ascending last summer. The plot, such as it is, goes like this: Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) is a cold-hearted, U.S. intelligence operative who assembles a team of meta-human supervillains whose purpose is to save the world should a superhero go rogue and turn terrorist. Thus, the bad guys become the good guys. The team also includes special forces officer, Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) and his girlfriend, an archaeologist called June Moone, who is possessed by the spirit of an ancient witch known as The Enchantress. The team is an eclectic bunch and includes a Mexican gangster with the meta-human ability to use fire as a weapon and an Australian gangster with the meta-human ability to talk in a funny accent. The only members we get to know in any meaningful way, however, are Deadshot (Will Smith), and Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie). As a character, Deadshot is essentially just Will Smith playing Will Smith. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we’ve seen it before, in every movie Will Smith has ever been in. Far more interesting is Robbie’s portrayal of Harley Quinn. She gets all the best lines, but even these soon start falling flat, as they are all a remix of the same joke, a version of, “I’m psychotically unhinged, but also cute and sassy.” The creepy, voyeuristic way she is treated by the camera is also problematic and soon left me feeling as though I was watching an extended music video rather than a movie.

Prior to the film’s release, there was much hype about Jared Leto’s portrayal of The Joker. Certainly, the costume design is interesting, but as a character, the Joker is mere filler, Heath Ledger lite, only there to provide some back story for Harley Quinn and, based on the movie’s final moments, to set up a sequel. Almost all his scenes could be removed and the film would not suffer for it in any meaningful way.

As soon as our supervillains are gathered in the one prison facility, team member June Moone/The Enchantress goes rogue, turning full witch and terrorising a city by turning its citizens into faceless soldier slaves, creating an enormous, magical, swirling vortex of flying garbage, and dancing awkwardly. It’s up to the remaining members of our crack team of supervillains to stop her and save the world. Will they be successful, and at what cost? By this time, I no longer cared and decided it was best to continue viewing it all as a spectacular, nonsensical, effects-laden music video. I wished I’d brought headphones and my own music though, as the soundtrack is hopelessly clichéd.

I made it through to the end of the film and we assembled in the lobby of the cinema, before walking back to school. I quizzed a few of my students on their thoughts and they said they liked it. We headed back to school. As we neared the gates, a couple of my students were walking behind me, chatting idly, as teenage girls are wont to do. I wasn’t paying much attention until I heard one of them say, “Is it true that every time you go for a poo you lose two kilograms?” This was a conversation I felt I needed to be part of. I turned my head and asked her where she had gotten this information. “My sister,” she replied, “she says it’s true.” The three of us discussed this as we walked and decided that it would depend on what one had eaten previously. I thought it sounded a little extreme; a two-kilo poo would be a fearsome beast indeed. We parted ways at the school gates and I laughed and thanked her for making my day. And she had. It’s little moments like these that make the challenge and frustration of being a teacher worthwhile. It was a great way to end a trip to see a movie that was, in the end, truly disappointing.

However, that’s just my opinion. And what would I know? I’m just a middle-aged, grey-haired, white male teacher. Most of my students loved it. I surveyed them the following day and 34.6% of them gave it 5 stars, with another 30.8% giving it 4 stars. Which is great, because it’s not about me and my opinions at all. It’s about theirs, and they all want to know when we can go to the movies again. I told them next term, once the seniors are on exam leave. That’ll leave me plenty of time to do some photocopying.

Have you seen Suicide Squad? What did you think of it? Let me know in the comments.


FREE BOOK!

What Friends Are For, by J.B. Reynolds

A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.

GET YOUR FREE BOOK >>

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