Revised Thesis Statement and Annotated Bibliography

Thesis Statement:

In his works Othello, Hamlet, and _______, Shakespeare addresses universally applicable themes such as communication and trust that are important for secondary students to understand.


After some thinking and reading comments on my last post, I have decided to focus my research on teachings secondary students about honesty and communication by using Othello and other Shakespeare plays. I am not familiar with many of Shakespeare's works however, and so would love feedback and some guidance from those who read plays with themes that could apply. I also am struggling a little bit to make my thesis argumentative, and would love to hear any thoughts/ideas. I want to explore these themes in two or three (I think too many more than that would be too large of a task) of Shakespeare's plays as well as explore the concept of how things are not as they seem ("honest Iago," for example).

Annotated Bibliography:
Social Graph
There are a few people that I think would be good to keep in contact with as I move forward on my research. One of them is my brother, Steven. We are close in age, and so have grown up together and have always bounced ideas off of one another. Another person is my friend Emily, who is an English major at another university. A third person is one of my favorite high school English teachers Dianne Madsen. She might be hard to get a hold of, but she would be a great resource.

I am on both Facebook and Twitter. I don't use Twitter as much, but I think I can work harder on that network because it is such a good way to reach out to a wider audience than Facebook.



New Media
I found some useful information on TeacherTube (including an Othello rap!). Many of the videos were amateur and so I don't know that I would show them in my classroom, but they offered good ideas on how to simplify the themes. One video had a great "web" showing how the characters were connected.

I also used Google Blog Search to find several blogs that are about Shakespeare. Blogging Shakespeare was especially useful because the blog had several links on the side that led to other blogs. There was also a teaching section of the blog, which is something that I will continue to look at as I move into my teaching career.

One of the blogs I found was Shakespeare Geek Blog and I was excited to see the volume of information that was there.

Social Networks
I found an online forum called TeacherFocus. There are not as many posts as I would like about Shakespeare, but there are many that will help me when I am thinking about teaching English on a more general level. One post that I read gave me an idea of a book to read, that I am going to try and find in our library.

Traditional Sources
Jacoby, Larry L., and Colleen M. Kelley. "A Process-Dissociation Framework for Investigating Unconscious Influences: Freudian Slips, Projective Tests, Subliminal Perception, and Signal Detection Theory." Current Directions in Psychological Science 1.6 (1992): 174-9. Print.

This is a pretty general essay about Freudian slips and provides a few ideas on how they happen. Since part of my thesis revolves around that idea, this article is a good match.