This was said by a southern journalist (well, he sounded southern) on NPR who was reporting on high school kids’ first time dissecting frogs. Never in my life have I wanted to take part in dissection but hearing clips of the kids screeching with disgust followed by, “Wait, this is interesting. This is cool!” made me wish I was in that classroom. There’s something addicting about standing alongside students experiment with something new for the first time. These last couple weeks my students and I have been discussing the Nurse and Mercutio in ol’ Romeo and Juliet. These two give rather long, and at times rather vulgar speeches and they’ve brought quite a texture of hilarity into my classroom. It turns out though, that nothing they say really advances the plot. Their words reveal their character, and this was a deliberate decision on Shakespeare’s part.
“You guys, I think I might be a lot like the Nurse,” I tell my students, “I can never just say, ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ I’m always telling a story.”
“WE KNOW!” they exclaim and giggle.
“And don’t you think everybody needs a friend like Mercutio? I have to admit, I think he’s pretty great.”
“Yeah,” they all agree with wolfish grins, some of them fully aware they are Mercutios.
I think it’s fun and a little risky to try on those bold characters. To experiment with a little crazy. To dissect your own personality and see where you fit in with what’s been studied for years. You take that stuff with you in the real world, don’t you think?
I know that’s right. Erin is a great writer and a teacher friend of mine. You can read the entire piece here. (Make sure you stick around her website and read more of her work.)
In a live concert of his that I was listening to this week, Dave Matthews riffed for about ten minutes. What he played was distinctive of his sound but he never brought the melody to anything familiar so that the crowd bubbled with excitement when they heard the beginning chords of “#41” or “Stay or Leave.” After awhile he stopped playing and said, “Because I just think that’s pretty,” and the crowd seemed to let out a collective laugh and then a cheer.
Amen to working on something, to paying attention to something simply because it’s pretty.
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