A while ago, Mansoor Alam posted a comment on our Top Tips for Shakespeare Teachers page suggesting that Shakespeare shouldn't always be taught - rather, the teacher's role is to guide students towards appreciation.

Here's the comment:

Shakespeare should only sometimes be taught! The students should be given maximum opportunity to "know" and "sense" Shakespeare for themselves - the teacher should only help them achieve this goal. Shakespeare can never really be taught!

I think this is great advice ... and something that teachers preparing for the new academic year should take on board. The best way to appreciate Shakespeare is to fall in love with the poetry, the rhythm and the texture of the text - and that's not easy to achieve with "Chalk and Talk!"

Do you have any advice for fellow teachers preparing for the new term? If so, leave a comment on our Top Tips for Shakespeare Teachers page.

In the meantime, Happy New Term!

On a recent trip to the childhood home of Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, I was amused to learn that for hundreds of years experts didn't know where she lived ... exactly.

Mary grew up on Palmer's Farm, which hosts a number of beautiful Tudor buildings. It was always presumed that the Mother of the world's greatest playwright and poet would probably live in the nicest of the houses. For hundreds of years, visitors have been wondering around the stunning wood-framed building that sits by the main road, soaking up the atmosphere, looking for poetic inspiration - that kind of thing.

It was image-perfect and worth protecting. In the late 1960s, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust took action to preserve the surrounding beauty of Mary's house. Rumor had it that developers were intending to build flats on the ground behind Palmer's Farm, so they cobbled together the money to buy the small farmstead called Glebe Farm.

All seemed assured until the year 2000 when the Trust commissioned new research and revealed that Glebe Farm, the smaller, uglier property at the back of the farm, was in fact Mary Arden's house.

I was a little disappointed because the image of the house wasn't quite what I had in my imagination's eye - the Tudor beams on the outside of the house had been bricked over. But I feel sorrier for the thousands of tourists who visited before 2000 and viewed the wrong house!

Professor Stanley Wells, Shakespeare scholar par excellence, has announced that he will stand down as director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust after 20 years at the helm.

His contribution to Shakespeare studies is widely recognized and highly respected, as a host of honorary doctorates from universities around the world signifies. He has also been awarded a CBE for his services to literature and the prestigious Sam Wanamaker award by the Globe Theatre in London for his outstanding achievements.

I'm sure that Professor Wells will be sorely missed - and will leave a hard act to follow.

Farewell Stanley!

I like to think that I live in "Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon" - but in truth I'm stretching my own capacity for romance!

First off, the river that runs through the town is called the Upper Avon, rendering the "Upon-Avon" bit that I love so much, defunct. In fact, in Shakespeare's time the town was simply called "Stratford" which doesn't have the literary rhythm that I so often enjoy rolling off my tongue.

I don't even live in the town itself as Shakespeare would have known it. Although my home is fairly close to the town centre, it would have been beyond the town boundary in Shakespeare's day.

And the final nail in the coffin? Well, it's sometimes hard to remember when living in a town that's not too far removed from a giant Bard Theme Park that Shakespeare didn't actually do any of the stuff he's famous for while living here!

Sure, he was born, bred and died in Stratford, but everything I love him for was done in London.

Well ... I might as well move!

Photo © Peter Scholey / Getty Images