Paul E. Turtola
One of the many small burdens for high school students seems to be reading a full length play. Some students say they don’t spend the time to read a play because it isn’t interesting enough to them. Some of them hide reading deficiencies that they have, and this disorder makes the chore seem like a nearly endless one (some are unaware that reading deficiencies even exist). Others don’t have the attention span to stay with what they are reading and fail to comprehend the text fully.
After hours of television viewing, it seems that teenagers are attuned to the visual and acoustic elements of whatever it is that they are watching: students usually produce answers to a play’s basic who, what, where and when questions. But few respond critically and many fail to answer the more important questions of how and why. Such shortcomings produce the absence of proper thematic understanding of the artist’s work.
