Some Strange Eruption: Watching ‘Station Eleven’ and Teaching ‘Hamlet’ to the Class of 2022
Every year, starting in April, when the long-simmering hunger for prom, summer, and The Great Adult Beyond bubbles over, I teach Hamlet to my class of high school seniors. My students were born a few years before the first iPhone-anvil crashed through our attention spans. A more merciful teacher might cut a word-drunk dinosaur like Hamlet, but I won’t. Not because I’m a canon-worshiper who thinks the mere presence of Shakespeare suggests rigor. With each passing year, I see my students struggle more and more to decipher Hamlet’s torrents of language, but they are also increasingly comfortable with Hamlet himself. As faith in the inevitably progressive trajectory of their world falters, they inevitably understand and identify with him.
has always been a vehicle for our existential vibrations, but the angst of my students has spiked. The class of 2022 negotiated the normal contortions of teenage growth on abnormally unstable ground—school closures, remote learning, masking, sickness. Isolated, shepherded onto already-addictive devices, watching an insurrection and police and vigilantes shooting unarmed Black men on their cell phones, seeing Covid case counts tick up and down and up again, they felt despondent, vulnerable, annoyed, and anxious. has become a tedious but accurate copy editor’s headline crutch. It wasn’t going wonderfully for American teens before the unimaginable froze their lives, but now it’s worse.
