Using emojis to teach Shakespeare will not help disadvantaged students
32 replies, posted
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/18/using-emojis-teach-shakespeare-will-not-help-disadvantaged-students/
Why is this even a thing
i'm glad we know this now before anything got out of control
I would either feel like a fucking retard if I was being taught Shakespeare with emojis, or feel like the people trying to use emojis to teach Shakespeare are retards.
not sure which is worse, but both are bad
This should have been fucking obvious. How utterly disconnected is the person who dreamt this garbage up?
emojis are fucking cancer
Given the examples they gave I dont think its a bad idea. How is it any different to use emojis as examples in french then to just use pictures like they do in texbooks? That headteacher seems like he/she has a problem with teachers using something new and interesting to teach.
Even in the cases where they used emojis to teach shakespear, they only asked students to use emojis to describe the emotional contex of the scene, which is good for testing if the students understood the work, and then having to argument their choice of emojis in plain english. I see absolutely nothing wrong in that.
👌🌌🍭🤴 😢
This might be an unpopular opinion, but despite being great literature, I've never felt that Shakespeare is particularly well-suited for teaching to high school kids to begin with.
I remember reading Romeo & Juliet in middle school, and Othello and The Merchant of Venice in high school, and having gone back to them post-college it blows my mind how little I actually comprehended at the time. Not only do they deal with some pretty mature themes, but there's historical context needed to fully understand the stories, the Shakespearean English adds a translation barrier, and modern translations don't convey the wittiness or structure of the prose.
I feel it's more appropriate to a college level, and if primary school teachers are feeling they need to incorporate youth culture to get students to engage in it, perhaps it's better to substitute in other great works of fiction that might be a little more approachable.
🐝🐝 or not 🐝🐝
It's almost as if civilization moved on from hieroglyphics for a fuckin reason to communicate.
Because we appear to have a deep hate for God's light
Visual languages are still pretty common; American Sign Language and many Eastern languages (eg Chinese, Japanese) being good examples. While emojis aren't much of a proto-language, the fact is that they're symbology existing outside the English lexicon that is increasingly being used to communicate through text.
I now envision of a future where emojis are a standard emotional addition to prose and it's too early in the day to start drinking.
No emojis could do justice to the cunt joke from The Twelf Night
i feel Shakespeare has a place in high school, but the schools always choose the worst stories for that age group. my class had to read Julius Caesar and Macbeth and we went nuts for that shit. it was easy to digest with all the spectacle and action going on and even easier to understand his style of writing and how it effected theater and literature.
Emoji are definitely a useful means of communication (and advertising, now that they've gotten so popular), but they're also a horrible teaching tool in a lot of ways since they're less than precisely defined and not exactly universal, still.
This is bad, because the emoji movie is easily the greatest Shakespearean play of our generation. We need to retell all of his stories exclusively through emoji's to truly update it to modern texts.
🐝🐝 or
https://media.giphy.com/media/U5MozYUQYYTfy/200.gif
Oh yeah, we did Julius Caesar my freshman year of high school, forgot about that. I would definitely agree with you that it was more digestible than the others I named, and would be a decent introduction to Shakespeare at a level high school students can understand. Still, there's a lot of subtext that you really have to dive into the text to grasp, and my high school curriculum lacked the time to really do it justice. A couple of weeks on Julius Caesar and then it's on to other things.
That's why I said I think Shakespeare is more suited to a college level. You're better served going into it with a solid grasp of the historical background, the English language, and the academic rigor to really deeply study a topic, and then spending an entire semester focused on that kind of work. Getting high school students to engage is such an uphill battle, as evidenced by this story.
Back when I was in school, the versions of the plays we had were actually twice as long as usual. The pages were split between the actual text, and then on the opposite facing would be a set of footnotes explaining all of the references, the jokes of the time, the context, the puns, all of that sort of thing that would fly over your head if you were just a teenager reading this stuff out of the blue.
That's the kind of thing you need to make reading Shakespeare educational.
See, considering the examples they gave in the article, I don't really get what makes you be so strongly against it:
“I’ve just taught A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, when we’ve read a bit of the scene, they summarise it in two main emojis and then have to explain it,” she said.
“The emojis are not used by themselves - there is always some kind of verbal or written explanation that then allows you to check the pupils’ literacy, writing skills or speech skills. The emojis just give them a starting point that they understand.”
This seems fairly sensible. I mean, its obviously not a super great exercise, but it uses emojis for what they were created - describing emotional context - and its use of emojis is only supplementary. Sure, you might say its a little childish for college, but I could easily see it working for something like junior high school, for instance. It kinda lets students be creative, its cute, and it might even be successful at engaging them a little.
Luca Kuhlman, a modern foreign languages teacher at a secondary school in Stockton-on-Tees, Co Durham, told the TES that emojis are a useful aid.
“Wherever possible, I take out the English words in a text and replace them with an emoji, so they associate the French with an image rather than with an English translation.
“If you can eliminate as much English as possible, they don’t need much explanation,” he said, adding that the symbols “have to have a purpose” and he does not overuse them.
This also seems like a useful example of people using emojis for learning purposes. As I said above, its not really much different then just using pictures to describe words, something that language textbooks already do.
Should use the skinhead versions instead like in Hamlet
http://i.imgur.com/es8xgrD.jpg
I think the benefit of learning shakespeare, other than for its historic value, is for reading comprehension and understanding how plays differ from novels. Turning it into hieroglyphs doesn't help with any of that and sounds like a way just to get people from failing without providing care they need.
What in the flying fuck is going on in america these days?
I... I have lost the ability to feel, I think. It was as if all my emotions packed up their shit and decided to eject themselves from my body. I'm numb.
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