Plundering the Undermine: Shakespeare in Mad Libs
So, among the things that people pay me to do is tutor ESL. At the end of last summer, a friend of mine offered one student to me because she was busy and wasn't exactly sure how to go about it. Anyway, that family has apparently been recommending me to people they know, because now I have four Korean students. I just started with the fourth this week, though she's less English as a second language. She's in fifth grade and her parents want me to work on English composition with her, since she really does speak English like a native, which makes sense because, although she was born in Korea, she's spent most of her life here. Anyhow, because it was our first meeting this week and I wasn't exactly sure what to expect, I decided to just bring a few writing games to set the tone that I am not just a boring teacher-person. So we played two truths and a lie, the game where we come up with a list of ten words and each put together a short story which includes all of them (which works best in a large group, but you work with what you've got), and did a mad lib, which is a sneakily great tool for teaching the mechanics of part-of-speech.

I made one myself out of the first half of the "to be or not to be" soliloquy from Act III of Hamlet, because the mainstream impression of Shakespeare as highbrow detracts from people being able to enjoy it for what's actually there. I like to point out the important role of dirty jokes in Shakespeare. I happen to really like Shakespeare, dirty-minded emo boy that he was, and like to encourage people actually getting inside his writing. Also, I get off on mixing high and low and like to unseat things on pedestals, because by and large things on pedestals are uncomfortable, and anything that thinks it is needs a reality check.

Anyhow, I thought other people might have fun with with this, so I've posted a pdf of the madlib and the sheet of blanks that allows you to make the list of necessary fill-ins without looking at their context. This makes it more fun to do by yourself or in very small groups.

"To be or not to be..." - the mad lib


A Famous Monologue
by Amber Shakespeare

To eat or not to eat: that is the food:
Whether 'tis stinkier in the nose to suffer
The hotdogs and arrows of outrageous stop signs,
Or to run arms against a sea or feet,
And by smelling end them? To turn: to sleep:
No more; and by a corner to say we bud
The toe-ache and the 13 natural trees
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a pancake
Dryly to be played. To die, to sleep:
To sleep, perchance to drink: ay, there's the whiskey;
For in that sleep of gin what wheels may come
When we have shuffled off this brick coil,
Must give us window: there's the car
That makes kibble of so perfect life.