The Shrew Hath Been Tamed

The Shrew Hath Been Tamed

Five weeks ago the PLP English 11/12 class set out to tame a beast of a project. In just five weeks we read Shakespeare’s The Taming of The Shrew, learned about the history of the women’s rights movement of the 20th century and wrote an essay answering the question…

How Can We Use Our Study of The Taming of The Shrew to understand how much, yet how little, has changed for women?

The introduction of this new project had me excited and also a bit terrified. I was very excited to study another Shakespeare play since I was a big fan of Macbeth, which we studied last year. The prospect of writing an essay scared me a bit. I had a vision like Lady Macbeth, of me, the night before the due date, writing an essay with no idea where it was going, and then someone getting an A on it? Not sure how that happened but look how visions turned out for Lady M. Luckily, our teacher wouldn’t let us get behind. Over the course of this project, we did extensive research and preparation, like mini-projects, so that we had no choice but to be prepared!

Getting Prepared

First of all, getting prepared means understanding the competencies being assessed.

is essentially what it sounds like. It pushes you to think about how lives and conditions have changed or stayed the same over time.

is harder to understand. Demonstrating this core competency means applying a variety of strategies, like note-taking or discussing ideas out loud, to comprehend and express how texts use features.

20th Century History… Women’s History!

As a woman (omg gender reveal!! let’s have a party 🔥 ), I was thrilled to be learning about women’s history and the women’s rights movement. Never in my whole school career can I remember focusing a whole project on the lives of women throughout history and surprisingly enough, I’ve not heard any talk of classmates outside of PLP doing it either.

Parallel to reading The Taming of The Shrew we began our studies of women’s rights throughout the 20th century. We read several texts written by or about women on a website called CommonLit. Common lit asked you questions at the end of each reading to help you analyze and reflect on the given text. After completing 8 CommonLit readings I could tell my ability to analyze text improved greatly. On the earlier readings, like The Lady and The Tiger, I got 81%, mostly struggling with picking out the theme of the text.

On the later readings like Susan B. Anthony, The Women Serena Williams’ Catsuit Controversy… I was getting 95-100%, having improved on my ability to pick out the theme and tone of texts as well as reflecting on them in the written portion.

As you can tell, this project wasn’t just about writing an essay. We also did a short project on women’s rights throughout the decades. It was a group project and each group was given a different decade to create a presentation on.

The project had its ups and downs that is for sure! It was a short one so we only had a few days to work on it. My group chose the 1960s as our decade which I was super excited about. With the advent of birth control and new and cool fashion trends, it was a revolutionary time to be a woman!

Group Poster

Most of our project prep happened over the weekend and trying to organize everyone over the weekend was next to impossible. However, we managed to decide what the presentation would look like and after that, it was up to our individual work coming together for presentation day! Though this project was short it was a really great way to learn about women’s rights over the decade. Instead of listening to a lecture from the teacher we got to hear it from our classmates and in the end, we shared all our research links for people to refer back to when writing their essay!

The Taming of The Shrew

William Shakespeare, a brilliant writer and a very sexist one at that. But can you blame the guy? He lived in the 16th century after all! Women were a long way away from being eligible for that whole “rights” thing.

The Taming of The Shrew acted almost like a case study for this project. The story was like a window into the past for us to look at how women were viewed and treated. With that information, we could compare it to the history of the women’s rights movement to understand but has changed and what has stayed the same.

As we read through the play I highlighted and annotated quotes that I thought would come in handy while writing my essay. This strategy saved me a lot of time later because I didn’t have to go back and search for quotes. Instead, they were already in my research document! Another benefit of highlighting the text was that it was easier to see what changed over the course of the play and what stayed the same.

Research & Reflect

To make the essay writing experience much easier, we were assigned an ongoing research document to fill with quotes from the play and connections to the 20th-century history we were learning about. By the time we started writing the essay my research document was 16 pages long! I used a variety of strategies to comprehend each text we watched, read or talked about. Making connections from Shakespeare to 20th-century history was something we worked on last year with our Macbeth project and our studies of the cold war, so this process was not new to me. The note-taking style I used for the Macbeth project as well as the one I use most often is the Outlining Method. This works great for lectured but with so much information coming from so many different mediums, I decided to switch it up for this project.

  • Quote Charts

I made charts connecting quotes from the play to history or to the first reactions I had so that my thoughts were organized and easy to learn from. For notes taken in class, I used the Outlining Method because I like it best when listening to presentations so I used it for Women’s Rights Poster Presentations.

Outline and Thesis

To prep, for my essay, I created a thesis and started an outline for my essay. The outline listed all the points I was going to use to support my thesis and had a rough design of how the essay would flow. I had specific quotes listed as well as some basic sentences and paragraphs written to help me structure the essay.

Revision, Revisions, Revisions!

After all my planning was done it was time to write the essay. The first draft started off well but by the last few paragraphs, I was struggling with where to take it. When this happened I made sure to take breaks so that my brain didn’t feel overworked. Another strategy I tried out was talking about it with my parents. Getting feedback on what I already had written really helped me while deciding what to write about.

After my first draft was completed we did an annotated draft where I highlighted the places I used quotes, history, Taming of The Shrew, etc. After that, I got feedback from my teacher. I also wanted some feedback from someone else so I had my friend read over it and annotate it as well. Thanks, Tamara!

After the first draft, it was revisions revisions revisions! My teacher wanted us to do well so she pushed us to revise and correct anything we could. One of my biggest struggles was with writing transition sentences. Sometimes my transitions were too broad which can be confusing to the reader. Othertimes I skipped the transition altogether… oops. After three revisions my essay finally had the flow and consistency it needed.

The Final Product

Click Here For My Essay!

On the last day of the class, my essay was finally done! I had nothing more to worry about, it was all in the past. There are a few things I would have liked to do differently. I think my essay could have used some more history. Feedback suggested including more primary and secondary sources so I will be sure to do some extra research on the front for future projects. I also think I could have included some more outside research in my essay. I used a lot of the resources we were given in class but I think my essay would have been stronger with some more outside research. In future projects, I will try to include outside research to extend my learning.

The thing I loved about this project was that everyone created something different! Though we all had to answer the same driving questions, everyone had a different thesis, answering the question in their own way. I liked that we didn’t have to directly answer the question. If the thesis was approved that meant it answered the DQ so all we had to do was back it up! PLP is a project-based learning program so writing essays is a rare occurrence. I thought I’d feel unprepared but with each stepping stone complete I felt more at ease. I felt confident in my ability to write a succinct historical essay that I could share with the world and I think that’s exactly what I did!

 

 

 

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