What’s not to love about love stories? Especially for teenagers?
Well, let’s think – how should we love them?
I’ve been thinking about Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The classic love story. Standard Year 9 English fare. Cue embarrassed titters from the girls, red faces and throat clearing from the boys. But they love it, surely? Secretly? There’s romance, swaggering, gang warfare, feuding families, divided loyalties, a meddling priest, a comical nursemaid, defiance of parental expectations… Sure, this is the stuff that Game of Thrones is made of – or at least, Meet the Kardashians?
Until very recently, I thought that the biggest problem with Romeo and Juliet was the language. Sure, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but then, it wouldn’t be Shakespeare and on the school syllabus. In particular, the current text my son’s English class was studying. But he’s good with language. He has a nice turn of phrase. I know that Shakespeare has provoked frustration among students for generations as they’ve wrested understanding from the archaic text (it’s always more easily grasped when acted). But surely language alone was not the cause of his absolutely visceral hatred for studying it? Especially since they were reading the graphic novel? And got to watch the enduringly popular Leonardo DiCaprio film? I mean, how lucky can you get?
The polite version of his reaction to beginning Romeo and Juliet in class was “It’s stupid. I’m not doing it.” Several days after that comment, I found out that he’d actually burned his homework. That’s a bit extreme – we have two dogs who could have eaten it for him.
Stop and think, though. What are some of the issues that teenagers are grappling with today more than ever before? It makes for grim reading. Depression, anxiety, self harm… suicide. A world spinning out of their control. A sense of helplessness and hopelessness that some feel ill-equipped to deal with.
So, yippee – lets do Romeo and Juliet. What are some of its themes? Hmm, lets think – Year 9 was a long, long time ago. A sense of helplessness and hopelessness? A world that the key characters couldn’t control? Ultimately, suicide. Even dressed up in Elizabethan English, these are themes that resonate strongly with today’s youth, and perhaps more personally than ever before. Studying such a text in detail could potentially be extremely confronting, even – though I hesitate to say it – damaging. It cuts close to the bone. No pun intended.
We wrote to the English teacher, explaining that our son was struggling significantly to engage with the text, for reasons which we were trying to guess at, as he wasn’t telling us why. This discerning teacher listened to us, and gave our son the Scottish play – MacBeth – instead. Not so much of the romance, still plenty of divided loyalties and its fair share of blood and guts. But a little more removed from the personal struggles that are so eloquently and devastatingly described in Romeo and Juliet. And, being a Year 11 text, there’s a bit of a boost to his self esteem in rising to the challenge.
I’ve written before of the difficulties in understanding what drives our children’s actions and reactions when they won’t voice their hopes and fears, concerns and anxieties. It’s up to us to try and find the context, the pretext, the subtext. As in, what’s the backdrop of their concerns – the context. What’s the excuse they’re giving for their actions – the pretext. And what do we think might be the real motivation behind these – the subtext. Frustratingly, it’s rarely easy to work all this out.
Sometimes they just need to “suck it up”. Maybe there’s a humorous way through the tangled web you’re trying to unravel.
T’was in a restaurant they met. Romeo and Juliet.
He had no cash to pay the debt. So Romeo’d what Juliet.
But be sensitive. That mightn’t be appropriate, or helpful.
Our kids need to know that we have their backs, and will help them find ways to express themselves – or do it for them – when they don’t feel up to the task.
Until next time, Happy Wombatting!
