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This blog is for Ms. Shores' tenth grade Communications students.
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2010
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March
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- Romeo and Juliet Act V: question 4
- Romeo and Juliet Act V: question 3
- Romeo and Juliet Act V: question 2
- Romeo and Juliet Act V: question 1
- Romeo and Juliet Act IV: question 4
- Romeo and Juliet Act IV: question 3
- Romeo and Juliet Act IV: question 2
- Romeo and Juliet Act IV: question 1
- Romeo and Juliet Act III: question 4
- Romeo and Juliet Act III: question 3
- Romeo and Juliet Act III: question 2
- Romeo and Juliet Act III: question 1
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March
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3 comments:
I think that Romeo and Juliet is a classic piece of literature that plays a big role in today's literature studies. It is regarded highly as one of the most treasured works of Shakespeare, and I feel that is due to its ability to be understand fairly easily. I feel like most students can relate to Romeo and Juliet in some element (although maybe not a literal sense in all of the play's situations), and that the characters are fairly well developed.
Today, there are so many novels and plays about "star crossed lovers" that can be found on local bookshelves. I feel that a lot of modern writers do look to older texts for advice when writing their own works. I feel that Romeo and Juliet is a good example of both a comedy and a tragedy, and it does provide a stable piece for others to look at for advice and inspiration.
It is both relevant and necessary to read Romeo and Juliet in today's modern age. Although the words and context of Shakespeare's written words may be altered slightly from the words that we are familiar with today, he incorporated a surfeit of vocabulary that we are able to learn through his play. Studying Shakespeare’s work also benefits an individual by exposing him or her to Shakespeare's unique style of writing. His words have a tendency to emit a pleasant feeling in the mind and on the tongue when spoken aloud. As well as providing us with an efficient source of vocabulary and further insight in writing techniques, Romeo and Juliet also provides us a unique sense of how our language is able to be captured and manipulated in order to convey even the most precise thought or meaning. Just as studying a foreign language is very beneficial in understanding our own, learning from Shakespeare’s work, as well as any piece of advanced literature or poetry, will help us to better understand how our own language functions.
I feel that it is important to read Romeo and Juliet because it is a major part of today’s cultural literacy. Society today expects you to read certain works that are declared classics and which everyone must read in school. I like this idea that certain books are almost universally read by nearly all students. Just this summer I had to read one of the great works by Charles Dickinson, “A Tale of Two Cities.” I was talking to my cousin and I mentioned that “A Tale of Two Cities” was on my summer reading list. Then he said that he had read that book when he was in high school and college, too. I find this fascinating that almost every older student has read this book. This is useful because after you read one of these works then you can have a discussion on the work with nearly everybody.
To fully understand why one must read Romeo and Juliet, you must look into how the human brain works and functions. One of the ways the brain works and learns is by learning something that is hard to understand. By trying to learn something especially challenging, you learn how to learn something hard. The next time that you have to read something similar to Romeo and Juliet, I would bet that you would find that it would be considerably easier. An example of this could be the last chapter in biology. The first of the processes that we learned, which was photosynthesis, was hard to understand because it was new learning something that abstract and complicated. However the next process, cellular respiration, was much easier because we had already developed, or well, at least were introduced to the process of learning something that was very similar. Romeo and Juliet falls into this category because you can’t just read it and understand instantly what each page means. You must look harder for words that you know and then either look up the words you don’t know in a dictionary or you might be able to use context clues to find out their meanings.
These are the reasons that I feel why we read Romeo and Juliet in our class. These same reasons are the reasons that I feel schools across America read Romeo and Juliet, also.
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