"I Burn. I Pine. I Perish."

I wrote a few posts ago about how I was going to be getting a new Shakespeare professor, and we met him for the first time yesterday. Although I am sorry that Dr. Christiansen is sick (obviously very sick as she gave up all of her classes for the semester), I couldn't be happier with the switch!

I had a few students tell me that Christiansen was a great professor to take Shakespeare from, and now I realize they said that because they were a little bit crazy. Apparently she "specializes" in taking a rhetoric based approach to Shakespeare.

I am working on my Persuasive Writing class through independent study right now and the one thing I have learned from it is that I HATE studying rhetoric. I know that there are people out there wholove that kind of thing, but I am slowly learning that I am not a scholar in that way. I thrive on creativity. I don't want to sit around analyzing how the use of a metaphor affects the audience in some way, I want to be experiencing something.

The new professor we have, Fox, takes an entirely performance based approach to Shakespeare. We watch films, plays, perform the parts ourselves. Whereas I would have been fighting for a C with this rhetoric based approach, I think that an A is definitely possible, and I will enjoy the class in the process. Grading is based on 2 midterms, a final, and 1 long and 1 short paper. That is it. Definitely much much easier than the previous professor's requirements.

I am reading The Taming of the Shrew right now, and I can't wait to start class discussion on it tomorrow! "I burn. I Pine. I Perish." I kind of have a burning desire to watch one of my favorite movies of all time "10 Things I Hate About You". Isn't it fun to learn when a movie you love is based on something as great as a Shakespeare play? And don't you just love when Heath Ledger sings to Julia Stiles in the bleachers and gets detention? Because I do.