English Teacher John Garrison and Max Turetzky ’25 co-authored a book review analyzing three new Shakespeare teaching guides published by the Folger Shakespeare Library. The guides focus on “Hamlet,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Macbeth,” with upcoming guides for “Othello” and “The Tempest.” The review will be published in the peer-reviewed journal “Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching.”
Garrison said the collaboration emerged from his and Turetzky’s shared experience studying Shakespeare in Garrison’s Honors English IV: Good Grief class. .
“Max and I read Hamlet together in class, but we also read parts of other Shakespeare works,” Garrison said. “When there was this opportunity to write a book review of these new guides, we decided it would be a fun project to integrate what he sees as a student and what I see as a teacher.”
Turetzky said he and Garrison split the writing tasks before coming back together to review and revise each other’s work.
“We had a rough outline for what we wanted to write,” Turetzky said. “We each wrote drafts of our assigned paragraphs, then met several times to put them together and edit. Through that process, we created one unified, coherent voice.”
Turetzky said their review examined how the guides engage current students by incorporating today’s cultural references and discussions of themes like race, gender and class.
“What we tried to do was strike a balance between what the books did well in engaging students with Shakespeare and constructive criticism about elements that could be improved,” Turetzky said.
Turetzky said this collaboration represents a shift from the traditional student-teacher dynamic.
“It’s someone who grades the things you write, now working collaboratively together [with you] , and there’s not that same teacher-student relationship,” Turetzky said. “It’s more like a relationship between two writers.”
Garrison said he views such collaborations as essential for fostering deeper engagement with writing among students.
“A great work of literature can only stay alive if people talk about [it] regularly,” Garrison said. “It becomes important to work with students to give people a vocabulary to talk about books with each other.”
