He doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus - why I LOVE teaching Julius Caesar

Now don't get me wrong...I am not disparaging Macbeth. I have taught the play for fifteen years but a few years ago, I just felt a bit bored. This was prior to Stuart Pryke and Amy Staniforth's excellent book you can buy here and it all felt a bit stale and like I was going through the motions every year. In 2016, I had an amazing GCSE class that I had taken through since year 8; they were fiercely political and switched on. Many lessons were spent discussing the US elections where Donald Trump had been voted in, the Brexit debates and the preparation for another UK general election. I had already made the decision to study Great Expectations with them as the issues about class and the coming of age of Sheila had really inspired them and produced some incredibly perceptive and thoughtful responses in essays. So I turned my attention to the Shakespeare element and decided that I would give Julius Caesar a go.

I had read Caesar before. For my own GCSEs I studied Antony and Cleopatra and it had fascinated me. My nana showed me the film with Elizabeth Taylor and I was obsessed with the costumes and exotic world of the Egyptians. I even ended up cosplaying as Cleopatra many years later, as you can see in the pics below!

As a self-confessed history buff (one day I will do that degree!) I did some more reading on Cleopatra and realised that she had had an affair with Caesar and even had a son with him in in 47BC - Ptolemy Philopator Philometor Caesar. This made me even more interested in reading Julius Caesar with my class as I wanted to find out more about this man myself. 

The students loved it as there were just so many parallels between what was going on in politics across the world and what they were reading in the play. They also loved the thinly veiled comments the play made on Elizabeth and the similarities to Caesar - particularly the image of Elizabeth below which they were able to link to the quote: "Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world. Like a Colossus, and we petty men. Walk under his huge legs and peep about. To find ourselves dishonorable graves."

As those who follow me know, I am totally obsessed with reading lit crit and using the ideas to really develop students' thinking and encourage them to be more perceptive. I have also found that since I have been using high level journals and ideas in lessons, uptake on English A-Level has risen drastically in my class, as well as the standard of academic phrasing and analysis. Every week, I would give each table part of a journal article and ask them to read it, summarise it, teach it to another table and then explain how it had developed their thinking in relation to an aspect of the text, character or context. I also loved reading these myself and I have saved a selection of the articles in the Dropbox link below for you to peruse.

The other great thing about the play is that there are so many contextual documentaries, articles and writings that students can read to really give them a deeper understanding about many issues in the play, from stoicism to the republic. There is a brilliant series by Mary Beard that can be accessed here and set for homework with a Cornell Notes template and the full movie is available here  

But perhaps the best thing about reading the play has been the improvement I have seen with students' writing for Paper 2 Language. Instead of shoehorning in AFOREST techniques, they had a much more sophisticated understanding of how rhetoric can be used properly, after spending so long analysing both Brutus and Mark Antony's speech as a model of what skillful persuasion looked like.

A few years later and due to the current climate, my department are not in a position to have different staff teaching different texts. So when we were developing our curriculum in 2020, I persuaded my Head of Department to replace Romeo and Juliet with Julius Caesar in year 9. She agreed...as long as I wrote the scheme! So here it is. Lots of ideas in it from fabulous teachers like Stuart Pryke, Jennifer Webb and Andy. Also a huge shout out to Donal Hale who kindly sent me some of his rhetoric lessons and I used and adapted as part of this scheme. Hope it is useful!