I, too, did Julius Caesar my freshman year. Memorizing the "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" soliloqy was one of the assignments. Hamlet was either 10th or 11th, I had the same teacher both years so I don't rememebr exactly. We watched the Mel Gibson version. I never did MacBeth all the way through but senior year we read excerpts of it. My 12th grade English teacher was a kindly, sweet but totally oblivious old lady so it was a total fluff class. I mean, she still put Daily Oral Language setences on the board everyday! Then my 2nd semester of college I did Hamlet again and we watched the Kenneth Branaugh version. I actually later went out and bought it for like $4.99 on VHS despite the fact that it's over 4 hours long. For the record, I never did any Shakespeare in middle school, however my grandmother was an 8th grade English teacher and she always taught her favorite, A Midsummer's Night Dream. But of course, I couldn't have her as a teacher when I reached 8th grade because of nepotism (however I did get to see it performed in the Globe Theatre in London with her)
What else was weird was the fact that the entire class sat through both "Girl to Woman" and "Boy to Man." When I was in 5th grade, they separated the boys and the girls and showed each group the appropriate puberty video.
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