We have recently completed our study of Shakespeare's The Tempest, which the students read aloud in parts. Everyone was very engaged in these readings, and I loved the dramatic flair with which they all read their lines. Many students expressed some trepidation about reading Shakespeare aloud in class, but they soon overcame their uncertainty and had a wonderful time. I have been studying the book Norms and Nobility: a Treatise on Education by David Hicks, and I was strongly put in mind of our study of The Tempest when I came across this passage:
"But the knowledge-centered approach to education recalls to the sophisticated modern mind what the ancients understood as the virtues of adversity. What a child can do should not become the sole judge of what the student is asked to do. "A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can," wrote John Stuart Mill (1944) The activity of learning takes place in a no-man's land between what the student can accomplish and what he may not be able to accomplish. This fact sets up a creative tension in education, to which both student and teacher must become accustomed and responsive. The teacher who refrains from assigning Silas Marner to his 12-year-old students because George Eliot's syntax is too complicated and her periodic sentences too long may be avoiding this creative tension. If so, he should not be a teacher. His students may never know the joy of reading George Eliot because he shirks a calling in which the daily work is accomplished through the virtues of adversity."
I have found this to be profoundly true! Here are video clips of Flint students reading aloud from Act 2 Scene 2 and Act 3 Scene 1 of The Tempest, crossing that no-man's land that Hicks refers to.
