Throughout the four years of high school, every student will read Shakespeare at some point. But, how many students will get the opportunity to act out the plays they read and analyze?

Freshmen English teacher Clara Caussey decided to make Shakespeare a little more interesting for her students.

“Teachers always say ‘If you really want to see if [the students] understand something, have them teach it back to you’,” Caussey said. “I feel like you learn best when you have to act out a play. It’s really boring if they just stand up and read it.”

Caussey’s classroom is set up exactly like a theater: there’s a black backdrop, three rows of seats for the students, drinks and snacks for the “intermissions” (time in between students’ selected scenes) and a Playbill for the entire day’s performances. Caussey has five periods of freshmen English students and each class had four to eight scenes acted out. Students would either act out Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or the classic, Romeo and Juliet.

To prepare for their big performance, the students worked on their scenes for four days during class.

“We went through our lines and through different props to see which ones worked to make sure the final act looked good,” freshman Ashwin Srivatsav said.

And props they had. Each scene had a variety of different props and unique costuming. In fact, there was even a pair of SpongeBob pajama pants.

Scenes lasted about five to ten minutes, depending on which scene the students chose. The acting of the students was, surprisingly, impressive. It was apparent that each student had a full comprehension of their scene, the language and the overall theme of the play. Also, students were given bonus points for memorizing their lines, an opportunity many, and almost all, students took advantage of.

“It was really hard to memorize the lines and understand the text because it’s all in Middle English,” freshman Zeb White said. “I like [acting it out] because it helps you understand what is going on because you have to gesture and act out the emotions.”

Caussey’s students traveled back in time to capture the essence of Shakespeare and his plays. Even though there was not Spongebob pajama pants hundreds of years ago, the students in Caussey’s class put a twenty first century spin on plays during their day of fun and education.