Hlootoo's Art

costlyblood:

So last week an email got sent round my college asking if
anyone wanted to read some poetry to primary school kids and I was the only one
who responded and I asked if I could do some Shakespeare, since I have quite a
lot of experience with it, and the teacher said that would be fine.

So I was discussing with friends what I should do and they
said ‘er yeah, don’t do Shakespeare.’ And I was like ‘what why’ and they went ’well,
maybe if they’re over 10 but otherwise you’ll just get blank looks’ and I went ‘well
I don’t want to insult their intelligence’ and then another friend was like ‘hey
you should do that kid’s song ‘When I Was One’, they’ll like that!!’ (it’s a really
babyish song for toddlers with silly actions) and I thought about it and was ‘like
nah actually, I’ll do the ‘Once more unto the breach’ speech’

So I learned that over the week, and I was walking up to the
school, and the whole way I was thinking ‘Oh god this was a terrible idea they’re
going to hate it, they’re going to look at me blankly like those kids in The
Polar Express, my friends were right it’s going to be a disaster’, and I was
there early, so I sat in the classroom for the first half an hour, got given a
cupcake by some kids from a different class, said hello to some of the kids in
my class, they got a look at me.

At half 2 the teacher mentioned I would be reading some
poetry, and I asked if we could go outside, which she was more than happy to
allow, and the kids were all so confused (‘where are we going? Isn’t it only
poetry?’) and we got onto the field, the teacher got them all to stand an arm’s
length apart from each other, so I could walk around them, and I did a brief
overview of where the scene came in the play, how the king is on the
battlefield, talking to his soldiers (“Could all you be the soldiers?” “Yes!!”)
and they’re attacking the French, who are all in a castle (forgot it’s really a
castle town), and they’re attacking them through a gap in the wall, the breach.
Me and the teacher emphasised that if there was anything they didn’t
understand, that was completely fine and they could ask me at the end. I asked
the kids to watch for when I held my fist in the air, which is when they had to
cheer loudly, we had a practise at that, and then I did the speech.

Everything I had been scared about evaporated. All the kids
were totally engaged, they were all watching me, they all listened right the
way through, I saw lots of excited faces, and they all cheered really well at
the end.

Afterwards, there was a lot of chatter, several of them
asked me questions (”how do you remember all those words?”, “what did you mean when you talked about nostrils?”), one boy asked me to do it again, they were all really
lovely and had genuinely enjoyed it. It was so much fun, and they especially
loved it when I told them how my big college friends had told me not to do
Shakespeare because they wouldn’t like it. Those kids 100% proved them wrong