Mohammad reading a dramatic monologue

The seventh graders were on a field trip today so we doubled up our classrooms and team taught. Perry Brokow, a retired teacher from Mt. Vernon, Ohio, and I joined together to teach today. Perry is teaching drama and speech to the students. He is teaching dramatic monologues which gives the students practice with speaking English in front of the group. Later this week, he is going to have the students perform parts of Romeo and Juliet

Today I talked to the class about Sonnet 116.

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

Morsi reading a dramatic monologue.

We talked about the form of the Shakespearean sonnet and the fact that the poem is written in iambic pentameter. We also discussed the fact that this meter is easy for English speaking people to read naturally.