The story below is about what it was like to teach Shakespeare’s Macbeth before the pandemic and then a bit about what happened afterward when we returned to in-person school. It takes place within Disney II Magnet High School and alongside Amanda Wessel, a then pre-service teacher with whom I worked. Disney II is part of Chicago Public Schools: it serves approximately 520 students from every corner of the city. It is a lovely place—teachers are committed to pedagogical innovation and service to students. For the most part, our students are trusting and flexible—willing to play along in the lesson of the day.

 I taught at Disney, in room number 205, for ten years, but I have since left to staff a high-school library up the street. While I was sad to leave my first and only teaching post (and the school where my children were elementary- and middle-school students), I could no longer sustain the emotional stamina required to teach and support adolescents who were suffering in the face of a pandemic and shattering racial violence. These catastrophic and relentless issues existed alongside the everyday growing pains of adolescence, which were rather ignored in the face of everything else. The requirements of my teaching day began to exceed the pedagogical innovations I could devise and the emotional support I could provide. I felt panicked, overwhelmed, and ineffective. I had to leave. I still feel feelings of failure for doing so.

Librarianship is more manageable than classroom teaching from a host of perspectives, although the emotional labor of working with children is intense no matter where you are. But I feel lighter and more hopeful than I did while teaching, in large part because I am not required to grade young people for a performance of the value they will or will not provide to a capitalist system that fails them time and time again. I am also writing a dissertation, which requires a good deal of time and attention, and is a welcome distraction from the feelings of failure I have about leaving the classroom. In my research, I reach toward stories as a way to try to mend our tattered classrooms. I don’t know how exactly (or if) this will work, but the essay that follows is a gesture in that direction. Perhaps if you read it—what I hope is an honest tale—you will find things to help your own teaching and scholarship. I hope it aids your efforts to make sense of what we and our students need in this violent world of deadly viruses and injustices of every sort. Stories are how we make sense of the world, and I am relying on this one to help us now.

Please note that names throughout the story have been changed.

There was no more space in Room 205 for anything or anyone. Tales of baby’s venom, monsters patched together from buried human remains, witches muttering spells, little girls wishing for blue eyes, grisly paintings of once-beautiful-but-now-decaying men, pear-blossom trees heavy with fat, polleny bees, a lust for power, and a lover’s revenge took up whatever space the students didn’t fill themselves. There were also all the things we carried—impending unit tests, missed assignments, new crushes and breakups, missed free throws. And then other things often too difficult to discuss, like violent neighborhoods, missed rent, missed meals. Lost jobs. Lost loved ones. We were packed in, as we always were. As classrooms usually are these days.

It was also humid, because teenagers are always a little humid. They’re fresh from the shower with wet hair and still sleepy, or sweaty from gym, or redolent of the steakish-scented air from the cafeteria. Humid and a little corny/salty smelling, since someone is undoubtedly eating hot chips.

Shades were pulled over the windows, but stripes of bright white light escaped around the edges of the blinds and kicked up dust in their stripey race across the floor. Desks and chairs were jumbled along the walls to clear space for a seating area around a stage I’d fashioned from repurposed bookshelves. (They were huge shelves, flipped over and reinforced with plywood. Then, flipped back over for standing upon. They were arranged as a thrust stage, just like Shakespeare’s Globe. My best friend, Rachel, who is an architect, helped me build them. One day before school, we jumped and jumped and jumped on them to make sure they’d hold.) Students sat and knelt expectantly on the floor, right up alongside the improvised stage. They were still and quiet. This was all quite new—entirely more exciting than any desk-based activity—and they were into it. Their eyes were glued to Richard in the center of the room. He was our Lady Macbeth. And he was ready.

Richard stood quietly atop the stage and off to one side. Sarah, his lighting tech, turned on her flashlight and beamed it up at the ceiling. She slid the light down the wall slowly, revealing Richard bit by bit. Head, shoulders, eyes, Jordans. The kids erupted in cheers, but quickly stilled, a little embarrassed, when Richard failed to respond and instead closed his eyes and kept them closed. (His eyelashes fluttered against his cheeks in the effort, like a baby pretending sleep.) He was wearing a white bedsheet cinched at the waist with a scarf, and a black bra around his chest. A crown of plastic flowers adorned his head. His lips were colored a deep, dark burgundy. He held a crumpled piece of paper in his hands, a letter from his husband, Macbeth. It shook as he began to speak.

Come you spirits,

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.
(Shakespeare, 1992, 5.1.39-40)

Richard recited the lines slowly and with the desperate, terrifying desire we’ve come to expect from Lady M. He pitched his voice gravelly and low, and called to the spirits with arms aloft. As Lady Macbeth summoned the “thick night,” Richard fell to his knees in anguish and ripped the crown from his head. He clutched at his cheeks, smearing his lipstick as he dragged his fingers down his face. He remained crumpled on the stage, exhausted with the passion of his ambition. The audience was so, so still. I don’t think Richard’s classmates anticipated that he— and, by extension, they—was capable of the performance they’d just witnessed. They saw something within Richard that scared them and were frightened that it was inside them, too. At the end of the scene, we all believed—in fact, we knew with ultimate certainty—Richard/Lady Macbeth would not fail.

We went wild. We stood and screamed his name. Screamed for more. Screamed for Lady Macbeth in celebration of her wicked performance. Witches from previous scenes leapt to their feet to chant their spells and dance in a circle. Two students—guards from a different scene—started a sword fight, aluminum-covered cardboard flashing and bending. Jayden tugged at my shirt to ask if he could switch his part from Duncan to Lady Macbeth. Basil, our director, was pale and haggard. He sat quietly in the middle of it all, taking feeble notes. Justin, our Macbeth, stood close to Lady Macbeth/Richard and placed his hand gently on her sleeve in an effort to rekindle some kind of connection with his wilding, bloodthirsty wife. He seemed a little frail and unnerved.

Class ended and we staggered, exhausted, into the hallway, even more musty and humid than when we started. Staring, classmates and colleagues asked if we needed anything. We said we didn’t, because we didn’t. We were entirely satisfied with our time together. We had been transported someplace magical where Richard was Lady Macbeth and Lady Macbeth was Richard, and together, they were ruthless. Sexed. Sexless. Full of desire. Drunk with lust for power. The witches rolled in from the misty moors, knights buried swords in the skulls of their enemies, murdered kings were ghosts, and everyone was everywhere all at once. For a few, lovely moments, we were within the “shimmering go-between” toward which Nabokov (1980) believes great fiction compels us and it was magic. Reflecting on these moments, I am reminded why I loved teaching—literature coming alive, community building, trust and care for each other, learning together.

For the next few days, my other classes heard tell of our adventures and asked if they, too, would get to perform Macbeth. Of course, they could. Of course! During passing periods, Richard/Lady Macbeth was asked for autographs. I equipped him with a fresh black Sharpie so he was ready to sign for his adoring fans. He was famous; the Disney II Weekly Family Newsletter featured photographs of him in costume.

Richard/Lady Macbeth inspired the rest of the Block Three cast and crew to take their jobs just as seriously. The lighting team got a little more creative; footwork was practiced and refined. The hair and makeup group bought some new hairspray. And Block Three, in turn, assured my other classes that a life in the theater was available to them, too, if they’d just give it a go.

I always felt there was an element of serendipity to my best lessons, whether everyone had slept well the night before, or was punchy and willing from lack of sleep, or the barometric pressure was high (or low or middle), or the cafeteria had blueberry muffins for breakfast—I don’t know. This time it was Richard who was responsible. Richard and the powerful works of art that tell us who we are as humans. Shakespeare’s Macbeth offers the context students need to try on different ideas, characters, and costumes, and evolve into themselves. A great lesson is a little bit magic, and certainly it is otherworldly when students transcend their everyday to invoke a character like Lady Macbeth—when they wear a black bra, black-red lipstick, a crown of flowers, and stand on stage under a spotlight to inhabit a murderous character who has been loved, reviled, feared, interpreted, and enacted across time and space for centuries. I do know that great lessons are more likely to happen when students and teachers are free to be creative and human, rather than beholden to the pressures of high-stakes testing, common core standards, book banning, and four-week data cycles.

The year before Richard took the stage, Amanda was an observer in 205. Like me, she loved reading and writing, and felt deeply their essential role in a thoughtful existence. She was a little bit older than traditional undergraduates and had a perspective on life that comes from lived experience. She wasn’t intimidated by the students; she felt sure of her own ideas. We loved each other immediately and on difficult teaching days, fortified ourselves with arguments about a Louise Glück poem, for example, and whether constructing an actual chokecherry tree from colored paper would help students make sense of Beloved’s (1987) nonlinear plot structure. We laughed all the time, doubling over and clutching our bellies at the riotous things that would happen as we tried to convey the power and relevance of fictional text structures to thirty-six adolescents who were entirely preoccupied by the effort required to sit quietly in small, hard chairs at tiny tables. Or by their phones. Or by the proximity of their nearest classmate and heart’s desire. Together we found the whole thing absurd (how do you help someone riven with hormones to think in orderly paragraphs?) and wonderful and full of joyful fun and love. The preposterousness of teaching is difficult to understand if you haven’t experienced it, and we felt fortunate to be together.

Whenever we had a break in teaching, or at the end of the day, Amanda would write her thoughts in a small notebook, her beautiful, loopy handwriting describing the endless questions for which each day of teaching demanded answers. I finally asked her what she did with her notebooks—how she used the pages and pages of writing she spent a good bit of time on. I wanted to know what happened to the questions she asked. She didn’t know. She never returned to the notebooks to read what she had written. She wrote to write. She wrote to make sense of herself and her experiences and as an act of contemplation and understanding. She wasn’t interested in the production of any sort of essay or memoir or “practical” text. She embodied the way I think we should teach students to write: for the ritual and practice of sense-making, rather than compliance with a rubric or the production of form. She wrote as a moment of reflection and meaning-making. For Amanda, writing had intrinsic worth and purpose.

Before her observation ended, she was assigned to me for her student teaching the next year and we were thrilled. We planned to meet during the summer to talk and plan our first units—we had to decide about the chokecherry tree, after all.

Rather than meet on our own, we decided to sign up for Bard Core, a program for educators created by Marilyn Halperin and The Chicago Shakespeare Theater (CST). A shared love of Shakespeare and a determination that our students would be equally captivated by his words made Bard Core registration an obvious choice for us. We hoped maybe we’d find some of the answers we were seeking about how to more deeply engage our students in literature—how to make them see that words on a page, whether written by them or someone else, held the secrets to living with thought and purpose. I’m not sure what, exactly, we envisioned as an ideal response to our teaching. Every child madly scribbling notes in little Moleskine, like Amanda? Never leaving their houses without books to read? Absolute joy in the fact of a writing assignment? Or a poem to parse?

Maybe the goal of teaching English language arts is to help students be conscious and deliberate in the lives they live, rather than bandied about by various winds and tides. As I write this, I think we really wanted our students to be just like us, which isn’t fair at all. And definitely not good teaching. Maybe the reason both of us left the classroom, for Amanda has left, too, is that we foisted our own needs and priorities on the heads of our students. I don’t know. Isn’t there some teaching manual somewhere that touts the importance of loving your content area? And embodying the passion for what you’re teaching?

Back in our classrooms, I think we both lost a little hope as we realized our own experiences with reading and writing were irrelevant and as our students were subsumed into the flashing immediacy of their small cell phone screens. The culturally sustaining and celebratory pedagogy required for helping students with “conscious deliberate lives” is a whole lot harder than we discuss and admit. The concepts and practices are entirely right and good—loving. Essential for both teacher and student. Practically speaking, though, how do you sustain and celebrate the wisdom of thirty-six children in a classroom, particularly when your own experiences are neither especially relevant nor interesting? I want to be clear that I am not whining. We MUST figure out how to teach inclusively and with cultural relevance/celebration, because there’s no other way to teach. But most teachers need help with relevance and celebration—their students’ and their own. With so many resources available—the beautiful teaching and writing of scholars like April Baker-Bell (2020), Paolo Freire (2021), Felica Rose Chavez (2021), Gholdy Muhammad (2020), and what I hope was an open, honest heart—I still couldn’t do it authentically, consistently, and well.

For several weeks during the summer, we met with thirty other public-school teachers in CST’s glassy office overlooking Lake Michigan and the giant carousel on Navy Pier. Everyone who participated in the program agreed that it was the best professional-development opportunity they’d ever experienced. Halperin and her team taught us how to enact Shakespeare’s plays (Macbeth, for us; other years worked with Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night) to make the text open, relevant, and approachable for young people. And it was a blast. Halperin invited expert teachers, linguists, and actors to show (not tell!) us how to organize Macbeth in ways that engaged students with language, forcing them up and out of their seats and into Shakespeare’s wild world of violence, magic, and power. We played with improvisation exercises, cut scripts, learned about choral reading, and ultimately staged our own production of Macbeth. Amanda was Duncan and seemed entirely at ease in her role. I was a witch. I loved my part, even though I was rather embarrassed about acting. It felt very awkward and obvious, and I was unhappy with my chosen costume of black baggy jeans and a t-shirt. I understood why some of my students might feel hateful and hesitant about the Macbeth/acting project and vowed to create meaningful jobs in the makeup and costume departments.

In Halperin’s program, the class is a troupe of actors and the classroom a theater. The teacher is an organizer and procurer of props—the producer, maybe? A group of students receives a small scene. For example, Richard’s team was assigned Act One, scene five. They oversaw the full production of their scene and were tasked with making decisions about what the scene means and how to interpret stage directions, costumes, props, and makeup—the whole thing. That’s how Richard ended up as Lady Macbeth. He identified (at least when he was in my class) as a straight male, but because Trinity, who was a witch, wanted to kiss Richard both in real life and as Lady Macbeth, his team contrived to cast him as Lady Macbeth and reimagined his/her soliloquy to include a kiss from a witch, accommodating the real-life desires of actors performing two-hundred-year-old characters. In doing so, identities were questioned and affirmed. Relationships were explored. What did Trinity love about Richard? Did she believe in magic? What did she value about masculinity? What did it mean to be feminine? How did Richard feel portraying a woman? Did he find his bra comfortable? What was it like for Trinity to kiss him on stage when they were both women? And what does the ability to ask these questions mean for a student’s experiences of school and official, institutional space? Whether or not students could articulate these questions for themselves, they felt them. They conjured the scene through imaginative impulses that sprung from their very hearts. We would discuss all of these questions later, pushing against what could be said out loud in a classroom setting, while at the same time helping ourselves realize the liberatory power of art—the magical power of Shakespeare’s words that ask us (dare us) to speak who we really are.

Several things are rumbling around in the background of this writing, not the least of which is our location in Chicago Public Schools. Chicago is a sanctuary for banned books, and I was free to teach Macbeth (and Beloved, and The Bluest Eye, and every other book that is censored in Texas and Florida). Teachers had the support of parents, and our school encouraged innovative teaching. The kids and I were safe to explore.

(Another wonderful moment: We were reading Neruda’s [1998] “Ode to My Socks,” a poem widely taught as school-appropriate probably because of its rather cute title. It is, however, as erotic as a poem can ever be. Kayia raised her hand. “Mrs. Wilber? I don’t think this poem is really about socks.” “No, Kayia. It definitely is not.”)

Disney II has gender-neutral bathrooms and an active Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA), and we celebrate non-Christian holidays alongside our students. In addition, at this point in my career, I was tenured, which is to say I felt unconcerned about how my administration might evaluate my pedagogical practices. Tenure, plus the new and freeing intolerance of middle age, gave me the courage to close my classroom door and teach from my heart, which in this case was to help my students read Shakespeare through the lens of their own personal experiences.

All of this creativity, willingness, and energy happened before the COVID-19 pandemic. When we returned from remote teaching, I leaned heavily into the morale- and spirit-boosting activities we practiced in Bard Core and that had been so wildly successful with Richard’s class— which had led directly to Richard’s career-making performance as Lady Macbeth and Trinity’s gender-bending kiss. Choral reading, group poetry compositions, improv exercises. They didn’t work. The kids just didn’t have it in them. I didn’t have it in me to overcome their defeat. We returned to our hard seats at small desks and decided to focus on simpler, quieter activities, like text-based questions on worksheets. We quietly hovered above our worksheets or stared at the phones in our laps. That was what we could do. Getting up on stage was just too much. Mustering the energy was just too much. I quit Bard Core activities when we came back from COVID, too.

Writing a dissertation is terrifying but less so than a commitment to helping hundreds of young people find a measure of joy in reading and writing amidst oppressive, institutional structures. As I write my paper, I oscillate between feelings of brilliance and abject, predictable failure. I’ve heard this is common. Without care and attention, the topic I’ve chosen—stories—could be solipsistic, narrow, tired, cliché, invalid scientifically—and much better done by more experienced and capable researchers and writers. I am, however, undeterred. With the giant, overwhelming problems that exist right now in our educational system, I am focusing on small moments and peaceful encounters in the hope that these micro-interactions will guide us toward greater joy and cooperation—a quick building of happier places that point us toward more peaceful, dialogic times. Shirin Vossoughi (2021), a researcher and scholar at Northwestern University whose work inspires and guides my own, compels us to “understand micro-interactional processes of human learning as tied to broader forms of social change, and the potentials of learning environments as lived arguments for the possible” (p. 200). I’d like to think this is what happened in 205; that through Shakespeare’s words, my students and I “lived [an argument] for” the many possibilities that exist for them in this world. The magic of stories.

Vladimir Nabokov (1980) names the “shimmering go-between” that mediates real life and the things we imagine: the edge and tension in the midst of the material world and the ghosts, princesses, wolves, heroes, and villains of stories we invoke. Nabokov suggests that only “Major Writers” conjure this scintillating place, and perhaps this is true. But the magic of stories—their ability to captivate and teach, alongside our willingness to let them do so—has been part of the human experience forever. Using language to organize knowledge and experience, human beings create their reality, as well as their “illusions of reality,” with stories (Bruner, 2003). Our individual and shared story grammars provide codes and logic for ordering experiences and constructing what we believe to be true.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were political issues tangled in a struggle to control and trouble our classroom spaces—spaces that should be occupied by the stories of baby’s venom, monsters, and little brown-eyed girls. This struggle reminds us that not all stories are productive ones—not every reading and re-reading celebrates and supports our young people, opening spaces for discussion, disagreements, and inquiry. It’s important, I think, to acknowledge the complexity of stories as a source of their power. And, even when we disagree, wrestling with their meaning opens spaces of new possibilities and compromise. Telling our stories is essential. Listening to others’ even more so.

Given the timelessness of stories, it is curious to think they might warrant more study and scholarship. We have worn well the paths of constructivism and language theory. We’ve radicalized structure and syntax to reflect our postmodern and post-structural ideology. Entire departments at leading universities dedicate themselves to creative writing and the innovation thereof. Yet, psychologist Auturo Danto wonders if we are still not very good at grasping how stories explicitly “[transfigure] the commonplace” (Danto in Bruner, 2003, p. 4). In other words, after all this time, we still fail to understand the power and seriousness of storytelling. We still cannot grasp, exactly, everything stories are to us. Perhaps this is their source of power. They do not pretend to offer easy answers to our troubles, yet they open a door to understanding, insisting that the “fictional, the theoretical, and the factual speak to one another” (Gordon, 2008, p. 26). I wonder if Richard remembers how he felt during his time as Lady Macbeth—if he felt transfigured. If he felt free, celebrated, joyful. I will miss his visits to Disney—his triumphal return as a college graduate or job holder or father. The teacher who now occupies my classroom moved the stage into storage.

References

Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy. Routledge.

Bruner, J. S. (2003). Making stories: Law, literature, life. Harvard University Press.

Chavez, F. R. (2021). The anti-racist writing workshop: How to decolonize the creative classroom. Haymarket Books.

Freire, P. (2021). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Gordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. University of Minnesota Press.

Morrison, T. (1970). The bluest eye. Vintage

Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. Vintage.

Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating genius: An equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. Scholastic Incorporated.

Nabokov, V. (1980). Good readers and good writers. F. Bowers (Ed.), Lectures on literature. Mariner Books.

Neruda, P. (1998). Ode to my socks. The Wilson Quarterly, 22(2), 118–119.

Shakespeare, W. (1992). Macbeth. Wordsworth Editions.

Vossoughi, S., Nzinga, K., Berry, A., Irvine, F., Mayorga, C., & Gashaw, M. (2021). Writing as a social act: The feedback relation as a context for political and ethical becoming. Research in the Teaching of English, 56(2), 200–222.