Recommended for YA / High School. Mature Content.
Here's the set of downloadable Reading Roles Pages for a high school classroom reading of Ian Doescher's William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Clueless which is basically the flick in iambic pentameter.
If you haven't gotten your principal's permission to teach this, seen the film, or sent home a parental permission slip offering to send students whose parents object to a colleague's classroom, you should before you start. There are awkward, sexually-charged situations, as in the movie, but never anything graphic or explicit. You know your students' maturity levels and parents best. If you feel at all uncomfortable, you can always use Verily, a New Hope instead. Verily is appropriate for use in middle school classrooms, down to 6th grade, as well.
I can just imagine the fun a 9th grade classroom would have with this!
Introducing Iambic Pentameter with The Taming of the Clueless.
Lesson Procedures:
- Buy class copies of the book. This sounds like a no-brainer, but each student needs to have a book in their hands to follow along. You also need to have the movie to watch, either through iTunes or however you buy movies for your classroom.
- Start by printing the Two Line Start Cards and laminating them, one set for each pair.
- Cut them up and put them in baskets on pairs of desks.
- Allow students to pair up or assign partners.
- If your class has already done the Two Line Start Cards for my lesson using Ian Doescher's Verily a New Hope, they'll know what to do.
- If not, have them first watch Akala's TedX talk about the links between HipHop and the Bard. Have a copy of the Sonnet #18 ready for them to read and follow, as well as the lyrics to Akala's two songs at the end. Then crank up the volume! The kids love them.
- Then students practice reading the Two Line Start Cards to each other.
- Students use a dry erase marker to write in the breaks between syllables and show the accent in the pairs. TW circulate in the room, checking to make sure students are placing the syllable breaks and accents in the correct places and that students "get" the poetry form.
- When they're familiar with the form, students begin reading the book and watching the movie.
- Keep track of which students read which parts using my Reading Roles Sheets.
Your students will marvel at how closely Doescher follows the movie script!
Teachers, please note: This play has even fewer speaking roles than Get Thee Back … to the Future! Therefore, this time in the Reading Roles Sheets, you'll find a "reader" for the stage directions. That's how few roles there were for this play!
If your class is small -- 18-20 students, max -- it will still work well. If your class is more like 30+ students, plan on at least half the class won't be reading aloud for any given Act. This could work well, if you have English language learners who need time to listen and figure out how the movie and play and language correspond. On the other hand, if your class is antsy, or very large, I'd look instead at teaching / using Verily: A New Hope, which has plenty of speaking roles for larger classes.
If you still choose to use this, it means you'll have to closely watch / record student readers on the Reading Roles Sheets, to make sure all your students get a chance to read out loud. There is also no "Chorus" part in this play, at all, so there are no all-class opportunities for speaking / reading aloud, either.
As with Mean Girls, a Reader's Guide is included / printed in the back of the book. It contains an explanation of iambic pentameter with examples drawn directly from the book, an explanation of using thee, thou, ye, thy, and thine, and a brief listing of the Shakespearean "hallmarks" of the text: the five act play, minimal stage directions, rhyming couplets at the end of scenes, asides, soliloquies, generous use of anaphora and extended metaphors / wordplay, and in this one, adapted songs from the movie soundtrack, which provide for some interesting lyrics / Doescher compare / contrasts. And you could always play the soundtrack, with lyrics, and compare / contrast that way, too.
Quirk currently does not offer a separate teaching guide for this text, so I'd recommend using it and the film as a fun, educational way to introduce iambic pentameter.
I hope your students enjoy!
