madteaparty: I fear that the problem is not unique to homeschoolers, that it plagues all teens. For students today, the temptations and distractions are staggering — and they're too young and naive to understand the perils. Also, these distractions come at key formative period for our students' minds (see this article my wife and I wrote: The Development of Adolescent Minds). At this age, concentration and deep engagement with every subject in the curriculum are vital. One thing we did with our students was restrict computer use to the kitchen table. While I think such measures help, I'm afraid the problem is here to stay. — When I think back on my own adolescence, I have no illusions: I would have been a total sucker for the distractions of the Internet and social media. —Roy Speed

baxterclan7: Two thoughts: Reading comprehension. I find that my Shakespeare students dramatically boost their reading comprehension — nothing like close reading of 400-year-old English to train students in the skills required for deciphering a challenging text. And what makes it all work is that Shakespeare is so rewarding, i.e., once you've worked out the meaning, you uncover something incredibly charming, or beautiful, or funny, or eerie, or thought-provoking. — And lest you fear that Shakespeare would be too much of a stretch for your son: I've found that sometimes the best way to lift teens out of their somnambulant reading habits is to pose a challenge they think beyond their abilities, then let them discover they can succeed with that challenge. (Few things in life are more exciting than overcoming an obstacle you consider bigger than yourself...) Note-taking. One underestimated aspect of note-taking that I consider vital is annotating a text. — See this article. — In addition, annotating helps with improving your reading comprehension. I would be happy to discuss, baxterclan7, if you want to know more — just message me, or you can email me at rspeed AT salientcomm.com All the best. —Roy Speed

Shellydon: It's distressing to hear that your daughter is struggling with this challenge — i.e., the personal essay. I have long been concerned about our standard approaches to student writing — for instance, students' being asked to write essays before they've actually read any. Unfortunately, the standard approaches don't always help the student discover his or her own "voice" in writing. Feel free to message me, Shellydon; I may have some suggestions. —Roy Speed

Shellydon: My guess: It will definitely hurt her scholarship chances. Both of our students wrote really fine essays for colleges where they hoped for scholarships; each received merit aid worth full tuition or more. — Difficult to imagine their receiving such awards without those essays... —Roy Speed

BusyMom5: About your daughter's writing: One thing that may help her take her writing to the next level is reading great essays. — It amazes me that we ask our students to write essays before they've actually read any. The challenge is finding a collection of really fine essays that most students will find moving and inspiring. — I searched dozens of texts & anthologies and was disappointed by the mediocrity of the selections. (Frustrated, I ended up creating my own collection of great essays and building an essay-writing course.) You can get a lot of mileage out of having your student read great essays. For instance, when my students find a particular essay really moving, I ask them How was that done? — In effect, I ask them to reverse-engineer the writing, and this is a powerful exercise for any student: The student locates the specific passages he or she found moving or inspiring (or just really interesting). For each passage, the student must pinpoint the particular things the writer did that made the passage so effective. (Students are usually able to locate specific techniques, like a really killer simile or metaphor, or effective use of parallel structure or repetition of a key phrase, or a devastatingly effective example.) Then I ask: Is there anything here worth stealing for your own writing? — For most students, this question is eye-opening. It's not about stealing a particular sentence or idea or image (i.e., plagiarism); rather, it's about peering deeply into how writing works, identifying key tools and techniques that anyone can use, any time. One feature of writing instruction that's usually underestimated: teaching our students to write for readers. — Left to their own devices, most students will either write for the teacher or write with no one at all in mind. Yet writing for readers is the whole point of writing. It's not just a vapid, academic exercise, nor is about earning a grade or gaining a credit. — It's a real-world skill, and certainly one of the most important skills our students will learn during their high school years. When I'm teaching students to write effective openings, for instance, I show them how to test their openings, i.e., determine whether their openings are effective. — Here's how it works: I have my students read just the opening of a student essay — then we stop. I poll the students: Okay, I say; raise your hand if you feel like reading on... From the number of raised hands, the student who produced that opening can immediately see whether his or her opening is engaging to readers. Also, I believe in teaching real writing tools. With openings, for instance, I show my students seven different approaches for crafting an effective opening. The same goes for all the other challenges of effective writing — our students deserve real tools for: establishing a key idea and then explaining/exploring/illustrating that one point all the way to completion; crafting sentences that are light and crisp, delivering a real punch; editing for clarity or impact — e.g., taking an unwieldy sentence and revising it to make it easy for readers to digest; writing efficiently; — and so on. Hope this helps, BusyMom5, or is at least interesting. —Roy Speed

You're most welcome, stlily.

Katilac: Two suggestions — First, I concur both with those who recommend you allow the B in Honors Physics, and with teachermom2834, who wrote that the course description is probably not the place "to highlight something personal like how hard he worked" — I think she's right about that. Second, you can turn your son's experience with this course to good use when you draft your Counselor Letter on the Common App. — In this document, remember, you convey your student’s qualifications for college; you give a comprehensive account of how he performed in various subjects and, equally important, his characteristics as a student: his strengths—work ethic, performance level, etc.; his weaknesses—and here, your ability to write about your son with insight and evenhandedness will lend credibility to all your documentation. You can acknowledge his lack of preparedness for this course, but the fact that he persevered with it will make a useful illustration of his mettle as a student. Hope that helps, Katilac. —Roy Speed

Innisfree: When this teacher asks how the student reads, he or she may also have in mind issues like the following — from an article on close reading: ____________________________________________ It is perfectly normal — especially when dealing with a difficult text — to mentally "go out to lunch" from time to time, to stare at the page empty-headed: I wonder what's for dinner… — The question is whether your student is onto him- or herself, aware of his or her own mental comings and goings, monitoring them, and when needed, steering back to the topic at hand. Monitoring your own experience as you read is vital. Even the going-out-to-lunch experience provides vital clues about your relationship with what you're reading: we don't space out for no reason; there's always a reason — even if it's just mental fatigue, time for a break. If we can pinpoint the spot at which our attention drifted, we can often identify the cause right in the text — e.g., the author made a historical reference unfamiliar to us; or the thought became really abstract, we had no mental picture of what was being referred to; or the author went off on a tangent or abruptly introduced a new train of thought and, mentally stuck in the previous point, we didn't follow. The point is, the mindful student: is aware of such reading mishaps and takes charge of his or her own learning experience; discovers the need to develop mental stamina, staying power, and embarks on a steady regimen of close reading with challenging material. ____________________________________________ Hope that's helpful, Innisfree. —Roy Speed

stlily: You might find the following article helpful -- it's my attempt to give students a perspective on why we annotate, i.e., the role annotation skills play in advanced study, like college courses: Annotation Your student may also benefit from this edited version of a famous chapter from Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book: http://classicalkids.net/files/How to Mark a Book.pdf Hope this helps. —Roy Speed

mom31257: Yes, it will be more burdensome than helpful — a real turn-off. Scribbling notes in the text is the way to go. See my articles: Close reading — Scroll down to the section "Close reading." Annotation Hope this helps. —Roy Speed

mom31257: First, I would second — Lori's comment about screen use; Farrar's comment that she thinks reading more is the best way to improve reading. ElizabethB, too, makes good points when she suggests — that accuracy is more important than speed; that your son combine note taking and focus skills. My hunch, mom31257, is that the way your son has been reading is not uncommon. Many students who show up for my classes start off reading that way. Yet the skill of close reading is a vital skill right across the curriculum — and it can be especially tough with textbooks that are not well written. By "close reading," I mean a couple of things: Engagement — i.e., the student is intellectually engaged with the author and the subject matter. Note-taking (see ElizabethB) helps, though I recommend annotating the text, scribbling directly in your copy of the book. — I've written extensively about annotating, e.g., see here. Self-awareness — conscious reading, i.e., with awareness of how you're reading as you read. For instance, when we read, we all periodically go out to lunch; we re-read the same sentence or paragraph while thinking about something else. The challenge is to be aware that you've gone out to lunch and ask yourself why. It's often traceable to an unfamiliar word or allusion, like Reconstruction, the Dreyfus Affair, or crop rotation; if you have only a hazy understanding of what's being referred to, the paragraph may never make sense. The larger point is that "self-aware reading" takes training — continual coaching by parents and teachers. One of the greatest temptations for the student working alone with a difficult text is pretending to understand: the student glides past something he or she doesn't understand and just keeps reading. The student does it mainly because telling the truth (I have no idea what this means…) leads directly to additional work (like looking up a word in the dictionary, or googling a puzzling allusion). Equally important, though, is the fact that pretending to understand can become a pernicious habit. And what makes the habit pernicious is that eventually the student fails even to notice when he or she doesn't understand. Hope this helps, mom31257. —Roy Speed

Middleton07: I wouldn't recommend relying exclusively on read-aloud. — Your kids are still quite young, so there's absolutely nothing to feel alarmed about. Still, there are benefits to your kids' doing significant amounts of reading on their own, and even during your read-aloud sessions, it helps if they can see the page, follow the words as you read. I've been teaching writing and literature for many years, and my wife and I have reared/homeschooled two children of our own. For what it's worth, here's my take on this issue: It's about their future as writers. Children learn their first, most important writing lessons not in a writing class — not through conscious attention to writing skills — but through the act of reading. — The act of listening and processing sounds into meaning is useful, but I would recommend that you distinguish in your own mind listening to a text; reading to oneself — and I mean the solo, visual act of engaging with black text on a white page and silently translating those characters into words and sounds, thence into images and ideas and events and people and personalities. Processing words in audio form is just not the same challenge and doesn't yield the same benefits, some of which I'll explain below. "Written English" is a slightly different language than "Spoken English." To illustrate: Reading is our only exposure to punctuation. Without reading, in other words, we would have no concept of commas, periods, colons, and so on. In your kids' solo reading, they become accustomed to seeing punctuation used correctly, and they will begin the years-long process of internalizing the complex rules of punctuation. A similar thing is true for capitalization, which doesn't exist in audio-English, and for the correct use and placement of apostrophes. Remember that apostrophes are used in two ways: To show possession. Bear in mind that in the purely audio version of English, there is no distinction among words like countries, country’s, or countries’; in sound, all three words are identical. It is only through encountering such distinctions over and over, thousands and thousands of times, that children begin to internalize the logic of the apostrophe and possession. To form contractions. In audio-English, there is no distinction between who’s and whose, it’s and its, they’re and their, and so on; kids first learn these distinctions not in a grammar class, but through the simple act of reading the written word. Also, have you noticed that students today will frequently write things like: I would of been there if I'd been invited...? — Ever wonder how a construction like "would of" gets started? — I suspect that it comes about through a dearth of reading; in other words, it sounds right, and most important, it doesn't look wrong. I could go on — as a teacher of writing and as a homeschooling dad, I have a lot to say on this subject — but I've already written a lot. Suffice to say that our kids, through their reading, get accustomed to ingesting information in the form of complete, written sentences, with all the right punctuation in the right places, all the capital letters in the right places, correct use of apostrophes, and much more. And I'm a firm believer that a steady diet of complete, written sentences (through reading) results in our kids' internalizing the written version of the language. That internalizing of Written English is a big part of enabling them to produce Written English themselves—that is, write. Hope this is helpful, Middleton07. —Roy Speed

"British Lit" is a big topic! With high-school-age homeschoolers, I've had great success teaching the following works from the Middle Ages: Beowulf — I used a prose translation, which I felt was more accurate than the verse of, say, Seamus Heaney; selected poems of Marie de France — they're translated from her Anglo-Norman French, but they're wonderful; Chaucer's "A Knight's Tale"; the entire Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; selections from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. I've had success teaching the following plays of Shakespeare: Romeo & Juliet; Hamlet; Macbeth. But you could also teach: Twelfth Night; The Comedy of Errors; Henry IV Parts I & II; Henry V; —as well as a number of others. I've also had great success teaching the following British novels: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) With such novels, I've found that it helps to read them in a careful sequence, e.g., in order of increasing difficulty, rather than, say, in chronological order. The reason: I find that with students aged 14 - 17, their reading skills are still developing rapidly, so that by the time we reach the works with the most complex content and style, the students are ready for those works. Hope this is helpful. —Roy Speed

SeaConquest: Please feel free to write to me via our website: http://hscollegebound.com/contact.htm All the best. —Roy

Susity: I am the homeschooling dad to whom RootAnn referred (I teach Shakespeare, among other things). A number of things about your description of your son prompted me to write — first, that he is "an enthusiastic reader/reluctant writer"; second, that he is "very social and live classes are preferred" and that he would enjoy a "well-run discussion class"; finally, that he "has low tolerance for 'boring' writing drills." Your son sounds to me promising. — It's not easy to generalize about students who are "reluctant" writers because, in my experience, students may be averse to writing for a broad range of reasons. But the fact that your son is an enthusiastic reader bodes well; likewise the fact that he enjoys discussion. I teach an online writing class that is live and discussion-based, but it's unlike most other writing classes in a number of respects — and I'm telling you this because I think your son may benefit from an out-of-the-box approach. Among my own methods: Reading essays. My students read and discuss essays by really fine writers — dozens and dozens of essays. One of the things I find appalling about most writing instruction is the way we ask our students to write essays before they've actually read any. So I'm a believer in giving students models, showing them what it looks like for a writer to speak his or her mind on a given topic. And my students often "reverse-engineer" the essays they read: when they read something they find really interesting or moving or insightful, they take up the question: How was that done? — And through discussion, they identify writing tools and techniques they think worth "stealing" for their own work. No literary analysis. I don't emphasize it; among all the essays my students read, only a very few could be called "literary analysis." — Equally important, I don't ask my students to write literary analysis (though they are free to do so, if they wish). The topics of the essays my students read include science, ethics, history, theater, writing, and more; some are personal anecdotes, with thoughts on (seemingly) random topics. As for my students' writing assignments, they are free to write on topics of their own choosing. My assignments often begin with one of the essays they've really admired — What if you were to write that sort of essay... What would you write about? Mindmapping. We all know that clear thinking precedes clear writing, but teaching kids to think is really challenging, and the traditional tools we provide them with are not great. So I believe in giving students 1) real thinking tools, and 2) abundant workouts with those tools — teaching them, in effect, to mine their own thoughts and experiences. — What goes on a mindmap is the raw ore they turn up in those mining efforts; then they need to practice working with that ore, refining it, and then arranging it all into a logical sequence. Your student probably has a lot to say — he just needs help connecting with his own voice in writing. And a traditional English class may fall a bit short of what he needs. All the best. —Roy Speed

This passage is from a blog on annotating texts — it's something I tell my students: At exam time, college students face a test that will ask them to recall all the important bits from weeks of study: not one chapter, but many chapters of their biology text, or their economics text; not one 470-page Victorian novel, but several such novels. In the week leading up to the exam, they can't simply re-read everything; there's no time, even if they don't sleep a wink. Besides, in addition to the biology class or the class on the Victorian novel, they have three or four other classes to study for, all at the same time. — So how do they manage it? They make the challenge manageable from the start by annotating each text as they study. Students who annotate a book leave themselves a breadcrumb trail through the entire text, marking all the steps along their path to understanding and digesting its contents. Good annotations are ones that enable students to quickly retrace their steps, quickly locate every important concept or piece of information and skip over the stuff that's less important. They're trails that are easy to follow. They haul all the buried treasure into plain sight. So at exam time, or when they're getting ready to write a paper, effective students don't study the entire text. They study their own annotations of the text.

Plagefille: Happy to help. — Feel free to contact me any time via our website. Best. —Roy Speed

JadeOrchidSong: If you do prepare such paperwork for a dual enrollment application, you won't lose your investment — i.e., just a year or two from now, when preparing your son's regular college application, you can simply continue adding course content, credits, and grades to the records you've already begun to build. Attached are 1) a sample transcript, and 2) a page from a course descriptions file. — These documents were build in Word, using templates distributed in the workshop Homeschooling the College-Bound Student. A few recommendations, no matter what templates you use: In your course descriptions document, follow the exact sequence of coursework shown on the transcript. — The reason: An admissions officer may see a course on the student transcript and want to know more. If the sequence of your course descriptions mirrors that of the transcript, the officer can quickly locate the details on that particular course. Give your records a professional look and feel. The more "put together" the appearance of your records, the greater an admission officer's confidence in the standards of your homeschooling. Hope this is helpful, JadeOrchidSong, and gives you some ideas. —Roy Speed HS transcript.pdf Course descriptions SAMPLE - page 1.pdf

Okay, good. I can upload a couple of essays I've used in the past to model this sort of essay — they both have decent conclusions. First, two warnings: To appreciate how each conclusion works, your daughter must read each essay in its entirety. Then she must: 1) read the introduction again; 2) read the conclusion again. It really helps if she's read the works under discussion (Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice). Things for her to notice: Each introductory paragraph discusses both: 1) the larger meaning of the work — e.g., "Jane Eyre is about strength of character..."; 2) the thesis of the essay — e.g., "Brontë uses Jane to portray how the pain of alienation can evolve into inner strength..." Each conclusion circles back to the introduction, referring to both the thesis and the larger meaning, e.g., in the essay on Jane Eyre, just notice how many times in her conclusion the student refers to the central ideas of strength and alienation. One final thing — something you and she may find useful for other types of essays: please see the attachment "ENDING YOUR ESSAY - Pages from Logical Communication.pdf." Hope this helps, Plagefille. —Roy Speed Pride and Prejudice - The Indispensable Foil.pdf Jane Eyre - From Alienation to Controlling Her Destiny.pdf ENDING YOUR ESSAY - Pages from Logical Communication.pdf

Is she writing straight literary-analysis-type essays for an English class? (Different types of essays call for different approaches for the conclusion.) —Roy Speed

Scuff: I have no idea whether this will help, but when I read about your daughter's perfectionism, this is what I thought of: When I teach essay writing, I emphasize mindmapping — that is, I always have my students sketch out their ideas before attempting any kind of longhand draft. When mindmapping, they actually draw what they're thinking, jotting down words or phrases as placeholders for much larger ideas or complex information. — What I've noticed is that when working in this way, my students seem to access a completely different part of their brains: the obsession with wordsmithing seems to relax, their thoughts begin to fly, their hands race to keep up with the ideas spilling from their brains, and they always report that with a mindmap, they accomplish a ton of work in just a few minutes. In class today, for instance, we had completed reading several essays that were in large part personal profiles — portraits of noteworthy individuals — so I asked my students to: take a minute (literally a minute) and brainstorm a few names of individuals they themselves might write about; from that list, choose the individual they felt most drawn to or thought might be the most compelling; take about three minutes to sketch on a scrap of paper the things they might include in an essay-portrait of that individual. The entire exercise took around five minutes, but at the end of it, each student was looking at a roadmap to a brand new essay. Do you think it possible, Scuff, that some such process might circumvent your daughter's perfectionist impulses? Please feel free to reach out to me directly (rspeed AT salientcomm.com) if you think such a thing might help or would like to learn more. —Roy Speed

What follows may be unorthodox, but it's my two cents on the skills needed for high school writing and beyond. (That is, all of the skills discussed below will support writing in college and in a profession.) To write effectively, students must have: command of language — the ability to put thoughts into clear English, with rich vocabulary, correct sentence structure, correct usage, and correct punctuation; knowledge, perceptions, & insights — in other words, they must have something to say; convincing arguments — the ability to make a sound case, with clear points supported by solid evidence; logical flow — the ability to arrange chunks of material to unfold in a logical progression, along with the tools for carrying forward an idea or argument from paragraph to paragraph, even sentence to sentence, such that the writer sustains (and the reader never loses) the logical thread; a sound process — a command of all the critical stages in the writing process, like: — thinking tools, how to get your thoughts clear before you try to write a draft (sentences and paragraphs); — an understanding/awareness of the different kinds of openings; — tools for the editing/revision stage, e.g., eliminating clutter, enhancing readability, arranging sentence elements for proper emphasis; etc. Students who can do all of the above will be equipped to tackle ninety percent of the challenge with virtually any kind of non-fiction prose — essays, reports, articles, and so on. These skills are invaluable for other kinds of writing, too, like effective letters, emails, proposals — though each of those formats has its own twists and turns and wrinkles. (The challenges of writing fiction, poetry, etc., involve other matters altogether.) As for the proper sequence for the mastery of all these skills, well, that's not an easy question. Writing skills don't develop and evolve in simple one-year increments. (The divisions of 9th, 10th, 11th grade are constructs of the school system; student brains are not so easily compartmentalized.) Still, you may find these thoughts helpful: Command of language — Can begin in 9th grade, but then never really stops, i.e., continues right through the high school years and beyond. In my experience, a student may learn, say, the five most important comma situations in 8th or 9th grade, but then needs reinforcement for several years (e.g., through the grading/correction of essays, along with reminders of the key concepts, like parenthetical clauses & phrases). Similarly, a student may learn in 9th grade the concept of parallel construction as a general principle, but then to use it correctly in one's own writing — and use it to great effect — is another challenge altogether (though with encouragement, I've seen students do it in 10th grade, 11th, and beyond). Similarly, students must engage in an ongoing, conscientious effort to enrich their vocabularies (Do I mean reticent or reluctant? — Is this a misnomer or a misconception? — Do I mean discreet or discrete, etc.), and that effort must continue right through high school and into the college years. Knowledge, perceptions, & insights — 9th through 12th grade. Having something to say is the biggest part of the writing project. It is the end-product of your student's broader education, ensuring that your student's mind and heart have been enriched and cultivated through both study and real-world experience, with the student encouraged at every stage to reflect on what he or she has learned. (In my view, studying literature is a tremendous support in this endeavor.) Convincing arguments — By 9th or 10th grade, most students' minds have matured to the point where they can appreciate a logical argument, handle various types of evidence (like statistics and citations), and so on. Many students can tackle these things earlier; it all depends on the individual student. Logical flow — Should begin in 9th or 10th grade and then continue. The skills involved include: 1) mindmapping or outlining; 2) constructing paragraphs around topic sentences, and then sticking to the point; 3) use of transitional expressions to signal where each sentence is headed with the logical thread (amplifying or intensifying a point; restating or clarifying a point; contradicting a point; showing cause or showing consequence; providing an example or illustration, etc.) — plus a few others. A sound process — The objective here is to use a writing process that both 1) is efficient, and 2) results in effective writing. Put another way, it's about producing a good product and delivering it quickly, with minimal pain. Students should take their first steps with mindmapping/outlining in 9th or 10th grade, but then they should develop more skill with that stage in the later years. Sure hope this is helpful, Down_the_Rabbit_Hole. — Sorry for running so long!

MamaSprout: Thanks for writing! Logical Communication is appropriate for high-school-age students with a pretty strong command of English fundamentals (grammar, usage, punctuation) and with decent reading skills. I'm accustomed to accommodating a range of ages in my courses: the content, in my view, is sophisticated enough to engage college students; my challenge is to make it all accessible/understandable to youngsters. As for course credit, yes, you can definitely award a full English credit, and as for other literature reading/study concurrent with this course: The weekly homework-workload you should estimate at around 3 - 4 hrs per week — more when the student is drafting a new essay — plus 2.5 hours of actual class-time per week. So it's your call, but I would think that your student could definitely squeeze in some ancient literature at home. (The beauty of homeschooling, right?) Missed classes: All classes are recorded and usually posted within a few hours. So students who can't attend a particular session simply view the recording. — Your traveling in September should pose no problem. As for my two other courses, History & Literature of the Middle Ages and History & Literature of the Ancient World: Middle Ages will likely be offered in 2019-20, and unfortunately, the Ancient World is not yet an online course. Again, thanks for writing, and if you have additional questions, just let me know.

Hi, everyone -- Roy Speed here. Saw this thread, and wanted to let everyone know that next year, in addition to my Shakespeare courses, I'm offering two additional courses in a quite different format. Both are year-long, two-semester courses: Novels by Women. The main event here is close reading, annotation, and discussion of great novels. There are only two major writing assignments — essays of literary analysis, with discussion and feedback. The course is expensive, mainly because it's live — over the course of the year, about 75 hours of instruction/live discussion. We read quite a range of novels, from Sofia Petrovna, written by Lydia Chukovskaya during the height of Stalin's Great Purge in the 1930s, to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton. Logical Communication. This is a writing course, but quite unlike other courses I'm aware of. The focus is essays, but two things distinguish this course: 1) The emphasis of the writing instruction is logical progression of ideas — in other words, I'm trying to equip students to organize and control their own train of thought. 2) As part of their writing instruction, students read closely and discuss dozens of fine essays and excerpts from works of non-fiction. This course, too, is 75 hours of instruction, and I'm teaching professional-grade writing tools (in my business practice, I create writing instruction for corporate professionals). Good luck with your 2018-19 school year!

Hi, everyone. I noticed my Shakespeare courses being discussed here, and I thought I'd provide a little information! Key features of my courses: Close reading. This is what really distinguishes the way I teach Shakespeare from other courses — working through scenes line by line, sometimes word by word. What I've discovered is that teachers aren't really doing this any more, not even at the university level. As a result, students merely skim the surface, never quite understanding precisely what Shakespeare wrote. To illustrate: Students who have actually performed in productions of Romeo & Juliet tell me that my course on that play is a revelation, that they discover things they never learned during months and months of memorization, scene study, and rehearsal. Shakespeare's art. Students find the close-reading approach thrilling, and for good reason: it's the only thing that enables them to perceive what Shakespeare was up to in every scene and really appreciate the magnitude of what he accomplished. — And make no mistake, his work represents a towering achievement. I love Dickens, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Charlotte Brontë, et al., but none of those writers even comes close to Shakespeare's art and achievement. Study skills. Along with close reading, I teach the kids to annotate their text. Equally important, I show them why it's important (see here). My aim is twofold: first, to build their confidence with tackling any kind of difficult text, equip them with real tools for getting beneath the surface; second, to show them that a text may look like a boring, barren patch of ground but conceal buried treasure. In my lineup of courses, each course represents a different stage in the student's learning: The Romeo & Juliet series serves as my introduction to Shakespeare, i.e., in addition to tackling that play, we go over the fundamentals of Shakespeare's biography, his verse, the Elizabethan theater, and so on. The Hamlet series leaps to a play that's more sophisticated in every way — mature themes, psychological complexity, subtle effects, astonishing innovation — but I show my students how to make sense of it all. With the Macbeth series, we study a play that's like a perfect gem (it makes Hamlet seem like a sprawling mess). The writing is dense and expertly crafted; when students discover what Shakespeare accomplished in this play, their jaws drop. Hope all this is helpful. —Roy Speed