Introduction
In my first year of teaching, I taught 9 th grade Literature and Composition at a private school in Miami, on a campus that provided small classes and a modified curriculum for students with learning disabilities. The course required me to teach Macbeth. I was fresh out of graduate school and had a lot of ideas about how to make learning fun and accessible for my students. I ordered a modified version of the play with images and a combination of the original and modern text, and we acted out entire scenes with various props made out of whatever was in the room. On the day that we finished reading Act I, in which Lady Macbeth wants and plans the murder of Duncan, one of my students said, "Oye, Ms. S - that lady is loca!" ("Hey, Ms. S - that lady is crazy!") After I finished laughing, I asked the student to tell me why he thought that. He replied that she was messed up. I again asked him to explain why. He said that everything she said made her sound like that. I asked the class their opinions and we launched into a lively discussion about whether Lady Macbeth was good or bad as both a person and as a wife. Some of the comments students made included, "She said that she would think his love was weak if he was weak - if my girl said that, I'd be gone!"; "She's a good wife - she tells him there's no way they'll fail as long as he is courageous!" It's been six years since then, and I've taught several other Shakespearean plays; however, I can still remember that student's comment and the ensuing discussion, which is what helped me shape this curriculum unit.
Four years ago I moved back to Charlotte, North Carolina and took a job teaching at Providence High School in the Exceptional Children's Department. Providence High School is one of 172 schools in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District, which serves just over 134,000 students. Of those students, roughly 48% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The ethnic distribution falls mostly to African-American (41.8%) and Caucasian (33.7%), but there is also 15.5% Hispanic, 4.7% Asian, and 4.3% American Indian / multiracial 1. For the last two years I have taught a variety of classes, including resource and inclusion English 9. A resource classroom is one in which a special education teacher provides instruction in the subject area to a class made up of students with varying disabilities, all of whom have an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). An inclusion classroom, on the other hand, is a class made up of students with IEPs as well as general education students, where instruction is provided by both a regular education content area teacher and a special education teacher. Students in a resource classroom typically need more individualized and direct instruction than those at the inclusion level of service.
There are several circumstances, such as my principal switching schools and teacher cuts in the district, that have left it uncertain what classes I am going to teach next year. It will be either English 9, in which Romeo and Juliet is part of the curriculum, or English 12, in which Macbeth and another play of my choosing are included in the curriculum. Due to the fact that last I heard, I was teaching the English 12 class, I am designing this unit using Macbeth. The unit can be easily altered to fit any of Shakespeare's plays, however. In each of the grade levels, the students are expected to understand the methods of direct (the author stating what a character is like) and indirect characterization (the author showing what a character is like using a variety of methods), albeit at different levels of understanding. Direct characterization is simple for students with learning disabilities, as most of them easily grasp the literal. It is what must be interpreted that creates problems for these students, who have not only reading disabilities, but also difficulties with processing and higher level thinking skills such as interpreting, inferring, drawing conclusions and making predictions. Indirect characterization presents problems at the higher level of thinking to my students because they must first be able to recognize that a character's traits are being shown to them by the author or playwright through a variety of methods before being able to analyze characters based on the characterization provided to them.
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