On August 26 I posted a complaint about high schools that teach the Odyssey as prose and received a pair of very thoughtful comments in response, in case anybody wants to scroll down and read them.

Of course, whether students read Homer's epic as prose or poetry, they deal with the work in translation, not in its original language. Even more egregious, as Mr. Hill notes in his comment, is that some schools are teaching Shakespeare in translation--as if Shakespearean English isn't really English. Laura's comment asks us to question the wisdom of this simplification. Why are schools teaching the Cliff Notes versions of the classics instead of the real thing? Is this to make students' lives easier--or the teachers'? Is anyone gaining anything?

A couple of years ago I led a Shakespeare project with second and third graders. One session started off with eight lines, written on chart paper:

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Hark now I hear them: ding-dong bell.

Once we read the passage together and talked about what was going on language- and story-wise, a number of squabbles erupted over whose turn it was to get up in front of the class and say the speech. We must have heard this passage read aloud fifteen times in a row. The kids could have spent the entire class just repeating the lines over and over to each other. And it wasn't the sense they loved: it was the sound, the feeling of the words in their mouths. 

How do you get that from the Cliff Notes version?