My Teacher, William Shakespeare

When most seventh grade students learn that they will be studying one of Shakespeare’s plays in their English class, their first reaction is not enthusiasm. A lot of people, especially kids who are new to reading actual literature, think of Shakespeare as wordy or boring, and the way that most teachers introduce his work likely does not help in leaving a good impression. Maybe they present a PowerPoint presentation on Shakespeare’s life, or hand out a sheet with a description of the plot and characters. That is what I was expecting when my seventh grade English teacher, Mr. O’Malley, announced that our class would be reading The Tempest for our next unit. I was about as excited as everyone else. I have loved reading since I was a year old and read books out loud to myself in my own language, but even I knew that Shakespeare’s plays were long and difficult to understand. Despite my lack of interest, it was Mr. O’Malley’s unique introduction to our first Shakespeare play that ended up changing my entire perspective of literature.

After lunch on the first day of our Shakespeare unit, I trudged into Honors English with the rest of my class to find a pile of The Tempest books on the floor, but no PowerPoint or stack of handouts in sight. Also nowhere to be seen, strangely, was our teacher. By this point in the year, we were all used to Mr. O’Malley’s joyful antics, such as juggling four hardback books at one time, but everyone was still taken aback when he ran into the room several minutes later. Gone was his usual outfit of slacks, a button-down shirt, and a tie. Instead, in trousers and an old-fashioned vest and hat, he looked like a character right out of one of Shakespeare’s plays. A hush fell over the class as Mr. O’Malley started the music on his computer…and began what he later referred to as his “Shakespeare rap.” For the next five minutes, our English teacher bounced and danced in the front of the room, rapping about William Shakespeare, his life, and his plays, using rhyming lyrics that he wrote himself. By the time his performance was finished, our class was both transfixed and hysterical, roaring with laughter but in awe at the same time. When it came time several minutes later for Mr. O’Malley to hand out the books and begin explaining the play, all of the hesitation and near dread had been replaced by giddiness and an eagerness to learn that is not usually seen among a group of 12-year-olds. Never before had I been so mesmerized by a lesson.

Mr. O’Malley’s enthusiasm did not stop with just the introduction. He took the idea of reading a play out loud to the next level. We did not just sit at our desks and slowly stumble over the big words and complex meanings on every page of The Tempest. Instead, we assigned roles and acted out scenes using everyday items from the classroom as props and scenery. Mr. O’Malley got involved in the action, too. He spent ten minutes acting out the death of one of the characters, turning a single scene in the play into a hilarious, dramatic reenactment. 

My experience with a person who inspired my literacy journey is not completely unique. Even Malcolm X, a radical leader who advocated strongly for African American rights, began his own path to literacy primarily because of a certain individual. Mr. Muhammad, he describes in his essay, “Learning to Read,” “had no idea of what a new world had opened up to me through my efforts to document his teachings in books” (125). Malcolm X began learning to read and write while in prison, where he was motivated by the teachings of his mentor. Mr. Muhammad was the first person to inspire his desire to become literate, whereas I learned to read at the typical age, helped along by my parents and earliest teachers. However, my experience with Mr. O’Malley is quite similar to the influence that Mr. Muhammad had on Malcolm X. Though my middle school English teacher was not the first person to serve as a motivator for my literacy journey, he certainly was the first person to offer such a unique and passionate perspective. He gave me the drive to view literature the same way that he did and share in his zealous approach to reading. Much like Malcolm X, I found myself changing my entire perspective to literacy based on the influence of one individual. It is interesting to see just how important motivation can be in this regard. While Mr. Muhammad inspired Malcolm X to begin his journey, Mr. O’Malley encouraged me to consider literacy from a new viewpoint.

It was Mr. O’Malley’s enthusiasm and unique method of teaching English that changed my perspective completely. By rapping about Shakespeare and acting out scenes from his play with absolutely no self-consciousness, he taught my classmates and me that anything can be made fun. He took a classic and difficult piece of writing that, under most other teachers, would have put me to sleep, and taught it in an environment filled with laughter and excitement. In her essay, “Sponsors of Literacy,” Deborah Brandt, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, describes literacy as a resource that “becomes available to ordinary people largely through the mediations of more powerful sponsors” (51). This quote from Brandt accurately describes the role that Mr. O’Malley played in my life. He offered literacy resources in a unique way that I would have been unable to gain elsewhere. As one of my biggest sponsors, he did more than just provide me with access to books and other sources. He encouraged us all to do more than just read and analyze literature. Instead of simply teaching us the information in the novels we read, he gave us the resources, both through materials he provided and his own contagious energy, to find the fun in anything we may have been tempted to cast aside as “boring.”

Since my experience in Mr. O’Malley’s seventh grade English class, I have viewed books for school in an entirely new way. No longer do I see classic literature as too long or boring to put effort into. Throughout all of high school, I read every book that was assigned and tried to find good or exciting qualities in each one. Ideally, I would not have spent the summer before my freshman year of high school reading and analyzing the novel My Antonia. I found it dry and lacking of much of a plot, and could guess within the first quarter of the book that it was not going to improve. While most of my classmates closed the novel altogether and turned to SparkNotes, I refused to give up, and used my junior high English teacher’s influence to make the most of it. I managed to find the good qualities in the characters and create more vivid pictures of the book’s scenes in my head. Mr. O’Malley taught me to never put a book down because it seems uninteresting, because there is a way to make everything fun. Today, whenever I find myself frustrated with the slow pace of an assigned reading or annoyed by the difficulty of a piece of text, I remind myself of that day in seventh grade English class, when my teacher transformed into William Shakespeare himself, and manage to find some enthusiasm for just about anything.

Works Cited

Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” Writing About Writing, 2nd ed., edited by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2014, pp. 43-64.

X, Malcolm. “Learning to Read.” Writing About Writing, 2nd ed., edited by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2014, pp. 119-127.