Document text
Photo by Drew Fleming Terry Cooper of Yakima, Wash., hams it up with Rebecca Sheinberg of Houston, Texas, Friday at Southern Oregon University. Teachers from across the nation gathered at SOU for a month to learn how to better teach the Bard. English teachers go back to school They take lessons in teaching kids Shakespeare By DANI DODGE ASHLAND -- High school students across the nation will get a jolt of intravenous Shakespeare this fall. Twenty-five English teachers finished a monthlong seminar on teaching Shakespeare through performance at Southern Oregon University Friday. And they were jazzed. "This is phenomenal," said Rebecca Sheinberg, a teacher at an inner-city school for at-risk youth in Houston, Texas. "What's interesting is we come from all over the U.S. and from different types of schools, but we all share a love of Shakespeare." The program is one of nine summer teaching seminars offered across the nation by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sheinberg and her cohorts were chosen from more than 100 applicants. They received stipends of $2,800 for travel, study and living expenses from the NEH. The program is led by Alan Armstrong, the director of the Center for Shakespeare Studies at SOU. The core of the lessons are plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Festival actors and directors as well as leading Shakespeare scholars from around the United States help teach the teachers. "It's important to use performance in every aspect of teaching Shakespeare," Armstrong said. "The most important thing is to get students to their feet and speaking Shakespeare. "We are really proselytizing this way of teaching Shakespeare because some other ways can sometimes kill the love of Shakespeare." During their seminar, the teachers see five different plays twice. The lesson is to discern how each performance can vary. Lou Steigerwald said "Othello" and "Henry IV, Part 2" were his favorite OSF plays this season. He works at a inner-city college-prep magnet school in Detroit, Mich. "I was talking to our performing arts teacher at our school and I said, `Why don't we ever do Shakespeare?' She said, `Because they stink at it."' Steigerwald recalled. "When I saw this NEH grant I thought maybe I could bring something back to the school. "And now I know I will do that." Friday, Steigerwald and the other students performed Shakespeare scenes in front of their peers. Terry Cooper, a teacher in Yakima, Wash., played a madam in a off-the-shoulder purple dress and a male messenger in his scene from "Henry IV, Part 2." "English teachers tend to be text-driven," said Cooper. "With that scene, though, there are prostitutes and derelicts and it's a lot more fun performing." Sheinberg played a floozy in the scene, much to the glee of her fellow teachers. One yelled out, "It's always the quiet ones." Sheinberg said directing performances of at-risk kids in Houston has proven to her that acting does break through the isolation students sometimes feel, although sometimes she has to wait for the students to get out of jail to put on their individual performances. "Theater changes their lives," she said. "They feel importance and self-worth and become a part of a group." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA