O Romeo, Romeo wherefore art thou Romeo?

I thought I would use my first blog post to talk about an issue I observed that was totally appalling to me. Earlier this year I was substitute teaching at a local high school in a Social Studies class. One of the students saw that I was reading and approached me to ask if I could help him with his English homework because he did not understand what they were reading. I said I would help if I could. He then produced a copy of Romeo and Juliet . . . only it wasn't a nice Shakespearean looking play book with a cheesy illustration of the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene on the cover (like the one I had in high school). It was an ugly yellow book . . . yes, a Cliff's Note book! I asked the student where his real copy of the book was. He informed me that was in fact the copy the school issued!! I was in complete shock. After looking at the book, I did notice that it had the real Shakespeare version on one page and the opposite page was the Cliff's Notes version of what was going on. Now I don't know about anyone reading this, but hopefully if you are following my Blog (or just happened across it) it is because you love books. I realize that Shakespeare is not easy for anyone to read (especially high school students), but aren't we not only teaching our children to take the easy way out by giving them Cliff's Notes to a timeless story but also ruining the beauty of the timeless lines written by Shakespeare so many years ago? Romeo and Juliet is such a classic and well-known story that many of the students probably have some familiarity with the underlying story of the play before reading it in the first place. Also, English teachers are supposed to teaching our children to learn to love to read and when the reading becomes difficult helping them understand the difficult content. Let's be honest, as a high school student if you were giving the Cliff's Notes and the actual play which would you choose? (I actually would've chosen the real version, but that is just because I have always loved to read.) Unfortunately, many children in school today hate reading and would rather do anything else than sit and read. Therefore, it is not a difficult stretch to assume that most of these students did not actually read the play but the generic Cliff's Notes version of the play. Technology has changed the next generation so much that they cannot even appreciate beautiful Old English Shakespearean prose. This episode had me completely appalled with our schools today and I can only hope that what I witnessed was an isolated incident among schools in my town, my state, and even our nation, and not an indication of how educators are approaching classic English text on a regular basis.