I thought our last class with the Shakespeare actors was very interesting. At first,a bit tired and unenthusiastic, I was not too excited about the idea of "interacting" with the text. Sometimes Shakespeare can be quite intimidating, but the way that they broke the workshop up was very effective. The discussion of iambic pantameter was especially interesting to me. To be able to have each person actually embody the stressed and unstressed syllables was very helpful to see. Also reciting the stressed and unstressed syllables separately was also interesting. I had never thought to do this, and the meanings and/or ideas that each line produced seemed very intentional of Shakespeare. All the activities we did were fun and engaging and really showed us a lot about the actors lives and how Shakespeare intended his work to be read/acted out. This close connection with the original intentions of Shakespeare was especially interesting to me.
On another note, I also had a lot of fun reading and writing our book reports. I thought this was an interesting assignment. What was most important and effective about this assignment was that we had to choose a work written by the same author (it couldn't be an anthology or a collection of poems). This really made me search for a book that had a theme which interested me. I spent quite a bit of time in the library and bookstore and ended up finding a book which wrote about the simple pleasures of the morning and the beauty of nature before the sun rises. I thought this was a simple theme, but it had some deeper thoughts that intrigued me. I also enjoyed reading some of the reviews that my classmates had written on the blog. I didn't have a chance to read many however, and I thought a fun follow up assignment would be to come to class with a few things to say about your book and/or a favorite poem from it. This would be a fun way to show each other what we learned, as well as inform people on some different books and authors.