Ladies and gentlemen, the Hobart Shakespeareans

I'm Rafe and I've been my 30th year teaching public school at Hobart Elementary School in downtown Los Angeles. For those of you who don't know, Hobart school is not easy. The children do not speak English as a first language. The children live in terrible poverty, and tragically, less than 40% of the children even finish high school.

But the kids in room 56, known to the world as the Hobart Shakespeareans, go on to attend outstanding universities and leave extraordinary lives. And here's the secret: I do not worry about preparing these children for a standardized test at the end of the year. Instead, I teach them skills that they're going to be using for the rest of their lives. That's the point, you see.

Through a rigorous curriculum, but also with immersion into the arts, these children internalize a set of values that they will use forever: discipline, focus, integrity, teamwork, a joy of learning, and they develop a command of language which has to be seen to be believed. And you're about to.

You know, this morning session is called "the classroom," but a classroom shouldn't be about a teacher talking. It should be about students doing. Therefore, thank you.

So the Hobart Shakespeareans don't play virtual baseball; they play baseball. They don't play Guitar Hero and Rock Band; they play the guitar, and they are a rock band. When these children stay late after school and come in on Saturdays to study Shakespeare, they don't take a test on Hamlet; they act Hamlet.

So, ladies and gentlemen, and our friends around the world, after you go, guys, here's Dave and Julie. Let's have some fun with the Hobart experience.

Good my lord, how does your honor for this many a day? I humbly thank you.

Well, well, well my lord, I have remembrances of yours that have been long, long to redeliver. I pray you receive them.

No, not I; I never gave you what my honor! Lord, you know right well you did. Are you honest my lord? Are you fair? What means your lordship?

I do love you once indeed, my lord. You made me believe; believe me, I loved you not. I was the more to see ya.

"Go to a nunnery; why was that? Be a breeder of sinners will help him, you sweet heaven."

So das Perry, I'll give you this place, my dowry, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.

"Go to a nunnery up quickly!"

"Farewell, now I am alone! My a coward who calls me villain breaks my pate across, plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face! Tweaks me about the nose, gives me the line 2/3 us the best along. Shoes does this to me! Huh! Soon as I take it free cannot be! But I am pigeon liver and lack gall to make oppression bitter, or ere this I should have fatted all the region kites with this slave's awful bloody body! Villain, remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindness! Villain of Bechet's, what a mastermind!

I have heard that guilty creatures sitting in the play have by the very cunning of the scene been struck so to the soul that presently they have proclaimed their malefactions, for murder though it has no tongue will speak with its most miraculous organ.

I'll have these players play something like the murder of my father before my uncle; the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

And so Hamlet goes on to write some dozen or 16 more lines into the actor's speech, and he even gives it a new title. He calls it "the mousetrap." And 400 years later, Agatha Christie stole that title for her own play, which is now the longest-running play in the history of world theatre.

Recently, there was a tourist in London standing in the rain and waiting for a taxi. When one arrived, he said, "take me to the mousetrap theatre."

All through the journey, he was grumbling about British rain and British taxis to the taxi driver. He arrived safely but did not leave a tip. Just as he was stepping aside to see the most famous trailer whodunit of all time, the taxi driver wound down his window and shouted after him, "the detective did it."

And so if you haven't seen "the mousetrap," you needn't bother now.

Well, we hope there's nobody here who thinks that Shakespeare didn't write these plays. There are some people who just can't send a thought that are perfectly middle-class men from the middle of nowhere, arrived in London and wrote two plays. They even write books to prove their odd little theories.

Some people, intellectual snobs perhaps, like to think that the philosopher Francis Bacon wrote the plays. And then there are social snobs who like to think that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays. Somewhere, no doubt, is a keen viewer of Masterpiece Theatre who likes to think that Alastair Cook wrote the plays.

Mark Twain put it very well. He said that in his view, the plays are either written by a man called Shakespeare or a man calling himself Shakespeare. We agree.

So always remember: if you cannot understand my arguments and declare, "it's Greek to me," you are quoting Shakespeare. If you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare. If you recall your salad days, you're quoting Shakespeare.

If you have worn so, wrote they don't anger. If your wish is father to the thought. If your lost property has vanished, it's a thin air. Shakespeare.

Even if, "good riddance and send me back." If you wish, "I was dead as a doornail." If you think, "I am! I know! I saw a laughing, saw a devil incarnate, stony-hearted villain."

What do you mind you, or blinking led by Joe? Oh yes, a with it again.

But me, no! But it is all into me, for you are quoting Shakespeare! Well power you.