Today we finished up a quick day-and-a-half overview of meter after spending about a week on Shakespearean sonnets. I wanted kids really to understand the level of Shakespeare’s achievement, how much he wrote in iambic pentameter.

“Remember, kiddos,” I said, “he was not only choosing words based on the ideas he wanted to express; he was also having to take into account their length and rhythm.”

In the evening, during L’s club volleyball signing and uniform fitting, I ran into two of my students who are playing on L’s team. They’re having a test tomorrow on sonnets but not on meter. It’s not in the standards in any sense, so I couldn’t justify testing them on it, and I could just barely justify to myself spending almost two days on it. It’s just on interpreting, on picking up on some of the rudimentary differences between modern and Elizabethan English. I reminded one of the girls to keep preparing for the test.

“We were going over it in the car,” said her father.