Apparently the story of my student Slug is far more interesting and funny than anything else I have to say, so in that vein, here is a nice little 'discussion' I had with an entire class. For a small bit of context they took a very basic, plot level quiz on Macbeth, and we were, as a class, going over the correct answers to said quiz. The question in question is "where do the witches meet Macbeth and Banquo?" Straightforward and pretty indisputable, but never underestimate the ability of the blind, or dim, to loose themselves whilst walking down a straight line. These students I will call 'Dog', because my classroom management mantra for the class is WWADD, as in what would a dog do?
Dog 1: Mr. Gross, I don't understand the question about where Macbeth and Banquo meet the witches.
Me: Well Dog 1, what don't you understand?
Dog 1: Where they meet Macbeth, it's not clear.
Me: Who else was confused by the question about where the witches meet Macbeth? (half the dogs raise a paw)? Ok, well, lets all open our books to scene 3 and see if we can't find the answer. (in case you were wondering, it takes a class of 25 16-year-olds 2 minutes or so to open a book, often requiring 3 or 4 repetitions of where they are to turn to). Ok, so where do they meet Macbeth and Banquo (no barks in response)?
Dog 2 (Dog 2 and Dog 1like to do this funny thing where Dog 1 carries Dog 2 around draped over his back like a towel, then put him down places like the floor, or a table, or on a desk): The battlefield.
Me: No, Banquo and Macbeth are walking back from the battlefield towards his castle at Glamis.
Dog 3 (Sometimes Dog's 1-3 do this thing where Dog 1 and Dog 2 play human ping-pong with Dog 3, passing/throwing him between them): Ok, Glamis.
Me: They are going towards Glamis, but aren't there yet. Look at the scene description before the witches say anything. Where does it say they are.
Dog 1: Heath.
Me: Yes, they meet Macbeth and Banquo at a heath. They also say they are going to meet Macbeth on a heath in the first scene in the play that we talked about.
Dog 2: Wait, where is heath.
Me: No, no. Heath isn't a place, its a geographical location, like a forest.
Dog 4: I thought Macbeth and Banquo were in a forest when they meet the witches? (in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, the Banquo and Macbeth stand-ins meet the witches in a forest. This actually does bring up something interesting in our cognition. Visual imagery seems to imprint itself much more readily into our memories than anything else. I have seen this again and again with my students; whenever I show a film version of a text we are reading, they remember the film more than the text itself. It is not just that they have not read or imagined the text, because I have experienced this myself with texts I read multiple times from childhood until now, and I not only remember the film version instead of my own imaginings, but I have trouble remembering the differences between the book and the film. Think about any book you read and know very well, a book you had elaborate imaginings asto what sets, characters, and particular objects looked like, and think about which you remember if you have seen a movie version of that book. Do you remember your Mr. Darcy or Colin Firth? What does Narnia or Hogwarts look like, how you remember it, or how the movie depicts it?)
Me: No, that is in Throne of Blood, which is based on Macbeth. In the Polanski version we've been watching, Macbeth doesn't meet the witches on a heath either, but in a cave.
Dog 1: Wait, I though the play starts out at heath, so are there two heaths?
Me: Yes. I mean no. A heath is a place, so there can millions of heaths. Look, here's the definition of heath (at this point I open up dictionary.com and display the definition of the word heath). See, a heath is an area of open, uncultivated land (at this point, I contemplate linking the heath setting into the desolate moral landscape of Macbeth, but decide against it given how things are going), so when Macbeth are on their way back to his castle at Glamis, they come across the witches in a heath, probably the same heath they were at at the start of the play.
Dog 4: I thought Macbeth was on the battlefield at the beginning of the play.
Me: They as in the witches, not they as in Macbeth and Banquo.
Dog 2: Isn't Macbeth named lord of heath by Duncan.
Me: Duncan gives Macbeth the thaneship of Cawdor for his bravery in the war. He can't be a lord because those titles aren't used in Scotland at the beginning of the play (in trying to explain what a thane is, I told the students it is like a lord, but many of them, in an odd bit of functional memory, remember the term lord, and misapplied it), and again, a heath is like a forest, it is not a specific place. You can't be lord of a forest.
Dog 2: Ok, so Macbeth isn't the thane of heath.
Me: No, he is the thane of Glamis at the start of the place, and is named the thane of Cawdor. He can't be the thane of heath for all the reasons I have already said.
Dog 3: Ok, so if I put that Macbeth and Banquo meet the witches after the battle, can I get partial credit?
Me (At this point, we have taken up 5, maybe 10 minutes of class-time on a question that has one, indisputable answer, so I decide maybe it is a good idea to move on so this small, 10 question reading quiz doesn't take up all 50 minutes of class): I'll review the answers myself. Now that we haven't cleared that up, lets move onto the next question so we might actually learn something today other than the simple definition of what a heath is.
This is a pretty typical level of disputation about a concrete, straightforward quiz question. Teaching literature, I am confronted with a double-edged sword of sorts: any answer where I ask for some analysis and insight is seen as subjective bull-shit, and anytime I ask for a concrete answer (like where was Romeo at the time of the street brawl that opens the play), there is general protest about having to read with any level of exactness. Anything, literally anything, they write down they try to get credit for, so for the above question about Romeo, I'll get anything from "not there" to "Verona" to "a garden", all of which are true (except maybe the last one) but none of which are the correct answer, which in this case is under a grove of Sycamore trees.
As an interesting side note about the above mentioned question, in it I gave the students the hint that Jay-Z references the answer in one of his songs on the Black Album. I thought it was a nice, relevant way to show that literature does not take place in a vacuum, and that the symbol of a Sycamore tree that Jay-Z used in the song "December 4th" refers back not only to Shakespeare, but to the Bible and Virgil. Unfortunately, what it mostly caused was accusations of unfairness because I did not say the specific the song on the album, or because not everyone listens to Jay-Z, and it lead to a general discussion amongst the boys in the class asto which Jay-Z album they liked the most, with some of the boys attesting to not liking Jay-Z for being 'soft.' So, my attempt to show how relevant Shakespeare is worked out pretty damn well.
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