Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
This sidebar accompanied a feature on Thomas Jefferson School in the March 2011 issue.
Teacher Boaz Roth opens by reciting a long poem, one of many assignments the students read over the holidays. “Test me,” he tells them, and they correct a few words as he goes. “OK, what form is it?”
“Sonnet,” a student calls.
“Is it Shakespearean or Petrarchan?”
“Shakespearean.”
“If I can trouble you, what makes it seem Shakespearean? What is its DNA?”
They describe the rhyme scheme, name the three quatrains and couplet.
“OK. As you read it, is there anything that makes you doubt that it is a Shakespearean sonnet?”
A student points out that there is no connection between the second and third quatrains.
“No apparent connection,” Roth clarifies. “Therefore we have some kind of mixed sonnet. It is Shakespearean in its form, but Petrarchan? That’s fine. We are walking on hot coals right now. Miss Zhou?”
“I think the disconnection between the second and third quatrain was solved by the last couplet.”
“The only couplet, by the way,” Roth inserts. Then he quizzes them, with subtle wit, on the difference between simile, metaphor, synecdoche, and metonymy.
Maheetha Bharadwaj points out that the poet’s “just killed the rhyme between die and dignity.”
“Oh, very clever,” Roth says. He begins to probe their ideas about the sonnet’s meaning.
A young man ventures an interpretation.
“That’s really cool,” Roth says. “It could be wrong. But maybe we need to reshuffle the deck. Does your dignity suffer when you silence the annoying?”
“Yes,” a student says.
“Worse than theirs?”
“Yes.”
Another student disagrees.
They discuss the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Better to be the shooter or the murdered 9-year-old? Back to the sonnet: “They that have power to hurt and will do none, that do not do the thing they most do show.”
Another student tries: “When something had the opportunity to be good and it collapses, it’s much worse.”
“That’s a lovely thought,” Roth says.
Mr. Kim suggests that anything can be substituted for “they.” Roth tells him “that just seems a little too vacuous. ‘They’ have to be something that has the power to hurt.’”
The bell rings, but the students don’t budge. Two more have their hands up. “Lilies that fester smell much worse than weeds,” Roth recites. “You read something called the Torah last year. Most people know it as the Bible. First five books. Can you think of something that is beautiful on the outside but given the rules of the game, it is unmistakably evil in itself?”
They come up with the golden calf.
“The sweetest things turn sour by their deeds,” Roth recites. It was Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, by the way.
He reminds the students to make sure they have the right edition of Hamlet for the next class. “Also make sure you come to class with a blank piece of paper. Totally blank.”
“Can it have lines on it?” someone asks.”
“I don’t want to see lines on it.”
“Are we going to write on it?”
“No. But it will help you understand Hamlet.”
Class dismissed.
