In my junior year in high school, I enrolled in a course titled “World Literature.” When I walked into the class on the first day, I expected to be handed a huge tome filled with authors from all regions of the world—Africa, East and South Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America/Europe. Although I was certainly no authority on great literature, some authors I expected to read were Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Dickens, Orwell, Austin, and Shakespeare.
I sat at my desk, inspecting the room. What caught my attention were large posters announcing various Shakespearean plays, a model of a theatre, and the teacher’s name written on the chalkboard, “Miss Steinberg.” What was missing from the class was the treaded book cart.
The second bell rang, and in walked Miss Steinberg. What struck me about her appearance was the large black horned claws that seemed too large for a petite-framed woman. Her hair, which was pitch black, was pulled back in a bun. She was wearing a well-tailored suit with no jewelry. Miss Steinberg’s appearance and professional manner left me with the impression that this class was all business. Her introductory comments doubled down on my overall impression and left all of us in class wondering what we had gotten ourselves into:
“Good morning, class. My name is Miss Steinberg. Before going into detail on the goals and expectations for this class, I want you to understand that the title of this course, World Literature, is a misnomer. The only world author we will be studying is William Shakespeare. I will not go into my efforts to convince the administration to change the name of the course. But, be that as it may, I wanted to be forthright with you about the works you will be studying. As you have probably noticed, the room has no textbook cart. Our department’s textbook inventory does not have all the works of Shakespeare. So, I will provide paperback versions of Shakespeare’s plays at a minimum cost. Before leaving class, pick up the reading list from the front counter.
Miss Steinberg then launched into a description of Elizabethan England. Her dramatic descriptions of royalty, poverty, plagues, and wars that shaped Shakespeare’s worldview placed me in a trance-like state—so trance-like that I did not hear the passing bell go off.
As we were leaving the class, Mrs. Steinberg informed us that there were openings in other literature classes if we wanted to drop the class. Several students I walked down the hallway with announced they were dropping the class. In the words of one of them: “There is no way I am spending a year reading all of Shakespeare’s plays. Besides, Steinberg is no joke. I can’t afford a C or D on my transcripts.”
There was no doubt in my mind that Mrs. Steinberg was no joke. I also had reservations about reading all of Shakespeare’s plays. There was something, however, about Mrs. Steinberg’s intellect and obvious love of Shakespeare that compelled me to remain in the class. It turned out that the year I spent journeying with Mrs. Steinberg’s Shakespearean adventure was pivotal in deciding to become a teacher and how teaching should be conducted. It was not so much the particular teaching methodologies employed by Mrs. Steinberg that made each period pass by so quickly. Rather, it was her enthusiasm for questioning the behaviors and motivations of the characters that Shakespeare wrote about.
I can still hear her call out at the top of her voice: “Mr. Jones, what do we have going on here?” What transpired next was not a literal interpretation of a character’s statement but a series of questions or comments from Miss Steinberg that asked me to grapple with characters coming face to face with their failings or pursuing power at the expense of others. There was no hint in these discussions of connections between Shakespearean themes and the politics of the day. However, I often left class seeing parallels between political figures we studied in history and family dinner conversations.
Aside from Miss Steinberg’s ability to incite doubt and stimulate the imaginations in adolescent minds, the usual trapping of institutional schooling—grades, quizzes, tests, papers— was never brought up. We were required to keep a journal that recorded our responses to prompts posed by Miss Steinberg or an open-ended question about what we were discussing. We were critiqued on our performance in different activity structures: debates over character motivations, creating modern adaptations, role-playing scenes, and watching film interpretations.
The critiques, however, were never the usual deficit-based model we all experienced in other classes. Miss Steinberg never made a judgmental statement focusing on what was wrong or lacking. Instead, she had the uncanny ability to focus on what was working for us and how we could augment what was working for us. She also possessed the rare skill of knowing when a particular activity structure was uncomfortable for the class. In these instances, she had a way of moving to a different activity without signaling that an individual or class was in over its head.
Although I was proud to receive an A in the class, what meant more to me than the A, was a comment made to me when she passed me in the hallway: “Mr. Jones, you make an excellent Shylock.” In addition to being an excellent Shylock, the other educational gift I received in the class, one which I only realized later in life, was being introduced to vocabularies and ways of thinking that allowed me to step away from my parent’s vocabularies and ways of thinking into a self-authoring individual. No, I did not leave the class rebelling against my parents. I did leave that class with a questioning mind. A mind that all school mission statements profess to be a goal, but are rarely practiced in classrooms or school offices.
Alan C. Jones 