Hamlet and the melancholy student

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/09/2022 (1354 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Mrs. Axworthy introduced me to Shakespeare’s Hamlet back in the day, I was immediately absorbed in the melancholy Dane’s struggle, as he grapples with human and supernatural traumas beyond his control.

I’ve had the good fortune of teaching the play a few dozen times and I’m always impressed with how youth connect to the Prince of Denmark’s moral complexities.

Hamlet is at various times thoughtful, creative, dramatic, intelligent, strategic, indecisive, athletic, depressed, introspective and downright confounding.

He feels betrayed, acts impulsively, seeks justice, trusts almost no one, fights with his mother, breaks up with his girlfriend, depends on BFF Horatio for support, and generally has trouble getting his act together.

Sound like an average high school student?

High school’s unique rite of passage is bewildering at best, mystifying at worst for most high school students. Does that girl like me? How do you do this math? Why can’t I go out tonight? Why doesn’t the coach play me? Why did he break up with me? Why is my boss so mean? You want me to wear that? Do I have to?

Inject a pandemic into the mix and life gets an extra shot of messy.

Before COVID-19, much research showed teens and young adults battling persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. The pandemic kicked their anxieties into high gear.

MacLean’s magazine refers to the COVID-19 pandemic as the “lost years”, a period riddled with learning loss, ransacked routines, and upended social structures for students immersed in the “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

A 2022 McGill University study determined that COVID-19 increased mental health symptoms such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD, along with feeling of isolation, loneliness and fatigue.

Hamlet’s spiraling isolation and depression offers a snapshot of a young man’s attempt to endure and survive in the most difficult of situations. His paradoxical burden of indecisiveness and empowerment offers unique insights on the fragile and irrepressible nature of the human spirit.

Students will emerge from the pandemic with a deeper sense of who they are and what they are capable of enduring. They’ve discovered new levels of resiliency and perseverance. They will re-ignite their excitement for new knowledge and skills and emerge stronger than they’ve ever been.

Perhaps there is “a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” but for now, students need to take charge of their learning destiny and reconnect with their best and curious selves.

Teachers can assist by designing work that encourages peer interaction and imaginative possibilities and by re-engaging with a community-at-large that has also felt the pain of isolation.

Students don’t have to feel like the beleaguered Prince of Denmark any longer.