Cyra-nope!

Last week, I mentioned a reading strategy that was working well with my 10th grade English classes as they read Joy Luck, where students participated in reading aloud together and each student had an active role in researching, note-taking, or reading. I decided to try the same approach with my honors students as they started reading Cyrano de Bergerac this week. After all, I had thought, it is a play. What better fit for reading out loud?

Turns out just about anything would have been a better fit.

We could have done a better job of reading paint dry, and that is not a mixed metaphor; it is literally true.


My first mistake was that I had students jump right into reading with very little background information other than the basic plot. My students knew that Cyrano de Bergerac falls in love with Roxane without her knowing, but he is ashamed of his large nose and believes that she will reject him. They know he resorts to writing letters to her on behalf of one of his cadets, Christian, who is also in love with her, and that she falls for the poetic charm of the letters but believes that they were written by Christian. That's really all I told them as I handed out the books. I believed the process of researching the pronunciations, historical references, and the names and places we encountered as we read would lend the background information as needed, on the spot. Unfortunately, the names of people and places are very difficult for my students to pronounce, and my own pronunciation of French words is atrocious. The need to stop and decode these new words made it difficult to get more than two or three pages in to the story on the first day.Also, there are tons and tons of characters who speak very short lines (in its original French, the entire play was written in verse, in rhyming couplets of 12 syllables per line). The rapid exchanges between characters made it more difficult than I had anticipated to get into a reading rhythm.

In addition to all that wait time for students to realize it was their turn to speak, as well as the stumbling over word pronunciations, I had just plain forgotten how many characters appear at the very opening of this play, and there were so many minor characters with speaking roles that I had not had students assigned to read the lines of virtually all of the characters we encounter at the opening of the play. Many productions of its time (it was written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand) and earlier plays have minor characters that "set the stage," but not many begin as this one, with the arrival of an entire audience, representing a cross-section of Parisian society from pickpockets to nobility, at the performance of a play.

The setting, in 1640s France, is alien to us, and the language used even in translation is difficult. There are many factors that have contributed to our difficulty getting started. A thorough presentation on the background would have helped, but perhaps this is just not the right piece of literature for our shared reading experience.

As we move forward, I am open to suggestions and ideas for teaching Cyrano to high school students. We'll continue to evaluate as we read.