Teaching teenagers

I don't claim to have gained any particular wisdom with the passing of the years, but I do feel that I have become a fairly good observer of other human beings. In particular, I feel that I understand teenagers.

As I may have mentioned before, I don't have a full-time job, but I do volunteer at my daughter's hippie cooperative school teaching English to the middle-schoolers. First semester I taught poetry, and this semester I am teaching drama. The youngest group is currently reading Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, and the two older groups are reading Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. It's fun, because they have such a fresh take on the plays, not having seen, read, or even heard much about them before (I thought everyone knew the story of Romeo and Juliet! What's wrong with modern society? Grrrr!) Their most frequent comments are along the lines of "That's so messed up!" (Macbeth and Lady Macbeth plotting to kill Duncan), and "Eww, gross!" (Juliet's nurse joking about the wedding night, or the Weird Sisters discussing the contents of their cauldron).

For Romeo and Juliet, I have selected four acclaimed film versions for the students to watch scenes from: the 1936 George Cukor film starring Leslie Howard as Romeo and Norma Shearer as Juliet; the 1954 Renato Castellani film starring Laurence Harvey as Romeo (yes, really) and Susan Shentall as Juliet;

the 1978 Franco Zeffirelli film starring Leonard Whiting as Romeo and Olivia Hussey as Juliet (whatever happened to them, I wonder?); and the 1996 Baz Luhrmann film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo and Claire Danes as Juliet. I wasn't sure how these young teenagers would react to these films: would they be bored? confused? annoyed? What I wasn't prepared for was the unbridled hilarity. They hoot with laughter as Juliet sighs "Ay me!" and snort helplessly when Romeo declaims, "O speak again, bright angel!" While I knew they wouldn't be able to relate to the very mature Howard and Shearer (What was the director thinking when he cast them?), I was shocked to find that they dissolved into gales of laughter over the younger actors as well.

What on earth is going on here? I remember being indignant when my Shakespeare professor Thomas McCavera told us long ago in the Shakespearean tragedy survey course I was taking my sophomore year that Elizabethan groundlings would have been rolling on the ground laughing at Romeo and Juliet; that true love was seen as the province of older people, and that such tender young things as Romeo and Juliet (supposedly aged between 13 and 18–not too clear on Romeo's age, but Capulet says of Juliet at one point, "She hath not seen the change of fourteen years") wouldn't have the first idea of what love was.

I asked my students, "Do you believe in love at first sight?" and the answer came back a resounding "NO!" That surprised me. I thought there might be a romantic or two in the class, but they all were very certain of their answer. It was actually quite refreshing. They all mocked Romeo's quick transfer of love from Rosaline to Juliet, and snickered at their haste to get to the wedding chapel (and thence to bed). They were exasperated by all the rash decisions they made, and they did not see any part of themselves in the doomed lovers. Reading from their point of view, I began to suspect Prof. McCavera was right about the humor in the play.

So, while I'm excited about introducing the kids to Shakespeare and all that his genius has put forth, I am also delighted to experience these plays that I spent decades studying in a fresh new light. Teenagers are maddening, moody, oppositional, and argumentative; they have the attention span of a gnat, the patience of a kitten, and the self-reflection of a lemur,* but their views and ideas are clear and as yet unclouded by what they think they're supposed to think. They react strongly and viscerally, and their opinions pour out of their mouths without much reflection.

In short, they're more than a little like Romeo and Juliet themselves.

*I say lemur, because they jump from branch to branch nonstop, sometimes missing and falling a bit before catching another branch. They seem the epitome of unreflective action. Oh well, I tried.