Middle and Upper School English Teacher Maria Fahey, who has taught at Friends for more than 30 years, is on sabbatical during the spring semester. Maria’s scholarly work, supported by Friends, has often been sparked by her work in the classroom. Maria comments, “When you teach kids how to read a metaphor, you have to think about it in the most fundamental and philosophical way.” Her classes on Shakespeare are legendary among generations of Friends students. While teaching at Friends, Maria earned her doctorate and published several books.
During this sabbatical Maria will further explore ways to teach literature and to think about doing so in schools beyond Friends. Maria explains, “I look forward to sharing practices I have developed at Friends with teachers at schools with fewer resources. I am eager to learn from them as well.” As a means of testing out some of her ideas, Maria will lead a class on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, via Zoom, for teachers at the Taktse School in India, where she visited in 2016.
When asked about the relevance of Shakespeare, Maria replies, “Reading a Shakespeare play demands the most of students’ imaginations. A Shakespeare play contains all the clues needed to visualize a scene, but students need to spot those clues and bring the scenes and characters to life for themselves. Shakespeare compels us to wrestle with humanity and the world in all its complexity, which is as difficult as it is refreshing for students who live in a world where public discourse increasingly flattens human and social conflict to soundbites and cliché. Shakespeare lays out the problems, but never gives us easy answers: he trusts us to think for ourselves, and he outsmarts us at every turn.”
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