Lee revives senior Shakespeare elective

Rebecca AsoulinStaff WriterShakespeare Literature will be reintroduced as a senior English elective next year under the instruction of Chon Lee, a current English teacher at Samo. The elective will join the ranks of several other senior English classes including California Literature, Bible as Literature/Existentialism, Folktales/Mythology and Women’s Literature.Shakespeare Literature has been an intermittently offered course at Samo during the last decade. The last teacher to take the reigns was Michael Surrago, who led the class for one year during the 2009-10 school year before leaving Samo.Peter Sawaya was the longstanding Shakespeare teacher until 2001 when he left Samo to teach at Santa Monica College. According to English teacher Berkeley Blatz, the inconsistent availability of the course was never due to lack of interest on students’ part, but rather because no one stepped up to teach it.Lee hopes to start a class that will endure. His “dream” schedule would be to teach Shakespeare Literature every period.“My love of Shakespeare and inspiration for this class started when I received the National Endowment for the Humanities Grant in 2007,” Lee said.Lee spent the summer after he received the grant in England with twenty other teachers from across the nation studying Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Lee called the experience “other-worldly.”While the class will not be watching a performance twice a day, as Lee did during his summer in England, his class will be structured around reading two plays simultaneously. The Shakespeare works will be contrasting pieces; the class will read a comedy in conjunction with a tragedy, or a history alongside a romance. The purpose, Lee said, is to juxtapose the works in order for the students to fully appreciate the vast range of Shakespeare’s talent.The class will read approximately six plays a year. The class will also read soliloquies, monologues and participate in “Readers Theater,” in which students act out parts of plays.Until this year Lee was a teacher at Lincoln Middle School teacher. He has incorporated Shakespeare into all of the classes he has taught, including eighth grade English. Sonnets were a staple in his middle school courses and his room at Samo is replete with Shakespeare paraphernalia.Although William Shakespeare is universally acknowledged as one of the most prolific writers of all time, Lee said students often have scruples about the relevance of his works.“Although the language is not modern, the universal themes in his works, love and betrayal, are the same in 1650 and 2011. Love is love,” Lee said.Fellow English teacher Blatz also believes that the course is an important part of the curriculum because Shakespeare’s themes are constantly recycled.“My own class [Existentialism] parallels Shakespeare’s works. To understand existentialism you have to understand Shakespeare. Just today in one page of Nietzsche we found two Shakespeare allusions. If a German writer can have two references on one page imagine how many other [allusions] there are!” Blatz said.Lee is determined to open the minds of Samo’s students to the wonders and relevance of Shakespeare.“I want to show these kids that Shakespeare is not just some 400-year-old dead white guy,” Lee said.rasoulin@thesamohi.com