Recently we finished our final unit of ENG 3U on Shakespeare's Macbeth. This brought the question to my mind "why is Shakespeare necessary to learn in class and how will this impact me in the future?"
Personally I found this unit challenging and difficult to understand. Throughout my high school years I have never really enjoyed reading any of Shakespeare's plays. I feel they were a good resource for learning during their time period, but in today's society they are frustrating and don't have as much impact on students. The messages displayed in the plays are relevant but I think there are better ways to teach teenagers these values using more current examples. Macbeth was incredibly hard to translate and I don't feel it would make a difference in a student if they ever read this play.
However when we used twitter as a medium it helped make the learning less painful and keep students on task somewhat. But I still feel it is something all English classes could do without.
I agree with you that Shakespeare is very difficult to understand at times. But maybe if it was put at the beginning of the course it would have taught us to analyze text more thoroughly since you have to really look at each passage to understand it. Being taught to use this skill early on would have helped us analyze each of the other texts we looked at throughout the course in more depth.
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