prokopetz:

The true irony of English language pedagogy’s obsession with Shakespeare is that we’ve got absolutely the perfect source material to capture a bunch of bored teenagers’ interest, but we teach it all wrong.

Most of Shakespeare’s comedies – and a surpising number of the tragedies, to boot – are wanky, high-concept genre deconstructions packed full of memes, puns, pop culture references, and complicated dick jokes. If you approached it right, I promise you’d be able to turn your average fourteen-year-old into an expert on 16th Century English popular culture inside a week.

Instead, we typically make them spend that week laborously memorising taxonomies of metrical feet.

What the hell is wrong with us?