Acts of Genius

 Working as a teacher, you get to see human beings doing silly things quite frequently. Sometimes they're intentional, other times entirely accidental. Mostly it's the students doing or saying daft things. I suspect this is solely because they outnumber the teachers by 30 to 1.

I gave my class a revision task for Macbeth yesterday, and some of the answers they put down were unexpected. For example, I got them to work in groups, and gave each group a sheet with a word such as setting or theme written at the top. They had to work in groups, and move from station to station, adding to the list of details about the topic. Of the four groups, only two actually wrote anything about the setting, and what they wrote was:

Group One
Ye ole' english days (style) setting
Scottland setting
mediaevil setting
castle setting (Dunsinane setting)
English setting
Supernatural setting (ghosts setting, vision setting, witchcraft setting)
war setting

Group Two (or Three or Four, whichever one actually added something)
Ye ole' gangster setting with a hint of the prehistoric era sexy witch setting.

Pretty impressive stuff for a Year 12 class. Especially the prehistoric element, that I had somehow missed in my previous readings of the play.

This also lead to an interesting conversation with Debbie, where she revealed that Ye Olde was in fact a misreading of the thorn character. The word 'ye' has, evidently, never been used to mean 'the'. It is, however, a misconception that has permeated mock olde language. The thorn character as a T-H sound, making the word 'the'. So it should be The Olde Shoppe, as a modern speaker would expect. It still leaves the usage I avoided yesterday as being a potentially embarrassing slip:

I gave my students a spelling test of Shakespearian words, and considered changing the title Spelling Test to a more Olde Fashioned style. Ye Spelling Teste is both gramatically wrong, but also very, very dangerous to write in front of students. Luckily I avoided the blunder*.

So now I have about 6 more short stories to mark, and a desk to tidy, then I'm pretty much free of marking and planning until tomorrow. Yay!

*I also avoided using The Old Pub as my example in this blog post.