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The month of March conjures many images: basketball madness, lions roaring, lambs bleating and closets that need cleaning.

In case you’ve forgotten, the saying for this climate location goes like this: March comes in like a lion (roaring, lots of wind) and goes out like a lamb (April’s soft breezes).

The madness of King Basketball in the South is being documented in the press and the media as well as in every church, restaurant and corner of North Carolina for the entire month and longer.

My mother always said if something or someone better than spring cleaning came calling, go with it or them. I have followed her advice each year.

I am left with a gnawing fear that my children will hate me when they have to clean out the closets I leave behind in my quest to enjoy the better things in life, such as friends, books, walks, movies and myriad interests that do not include housework.

March, to me, is a glorious romp through Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar,” surely intended by the author for a readership other than 10th- graders. The play, however, has been on the curriculum for the innocent young teens since the beginning of time, it seems.

At any rate, for 20 years I have attempted to teach the play to the willing students as well as the unwilling ones. The result has been an uphill battle worthy of Sisyphus.

First of all, very few students could pronounce Caesar properly. Each class lesson brought forth a hue and cry of Julius Seizure. Even now, I say Julius Seizure. A coincidence that I pointed out to the classes was that Caesar actually suffered from seizures, called the “falling sickness” in the play. Maybe I am the one who confused them about the name.

However, it is not hard to get the attention of 15-year-olds at the beginning of the Act I when Antony, Caesar’s friend, is asked to touch with a whiplike object the women who passed by him in a parade. This whip maneuver signified that the woman touched had a better chance of being fertile. Caesar and his wife, Calpurnia, were childless, so of course she got touched by the whip.

I saw the little lights go on in the eyes of the hormonally stressed teens in front of me. What? Another way to get pregnant? And there was no sex education allowed in the public schools.

The students thought Cassius and Brutus were stupid. Their plan to slay Caesar on the 15th of March gave them too much time to think about the deadly deed. Brutus couldn’t make up his mind whether it was a good thing to kill his close friend Caesar.

Brutus talked himself into the murder with what must have been the very first political spin in history. Why not kill Caesar, Brutus mused. If we kill Caesar now, he won’t have to think about dying at all. We’ll be doing him a favor, right?

One of the scenes in the play set off squeals of disbelief in class. Brutus’ wife, Portia, commits suicide near the end of the play by “swallowing coals.” How can you swallow hot coals? Nobody can do that — get the hot coals down the throat, that is.

For the big “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” speech (yes, I had to explain that “lending ears” means to listen), I brought out a film version of the play with the great Marlon Brando playing Antony.

The speech is the turning point of the play as Antony mocks Brutus for being “an honorable man” and proved to the audience that Caesar’s assassination had been a big mistake.

I didn’t ask the students to memorize the speech, as was popular in the past. Anyone who did learn the speech and gave a satisfactory performance in front of the class got an A.

To sum up the unit of Julius Caesar, I divided the students into groups, each of which had to come up with a group project. No fair getting help at home. All planning had to be done in class.

One group of girls re-enacted the Portia death scene with an interesting prop: a plate of burned marshmallows that they swallowed with ease.

Another group made a movie of the murder of Caesar scene. This group of mostly boys ruined the cement driveway of one boy’s home by spilling red Jell-O everywhere. Jell-O makes good blood.

The director used imagination by having Brutus flying through the air, dagger in hand, to stab away at his friend Caesar.

All the conspirators dashed at Brutus and stabbed him together 20 or more times. Then, with another stab, they opened the mighty Caesar’s toga and dipped their hands in his “blood” and lifted out poor Caesar’s entrails. Then the little darlings ate the guts of a great man.

The entrails were actually spaghetti from a can, but I thought those kids were brilliant to add this humorous touch to their film. As an aside, the director of the movie is now living in Hollywood and making his own films. You never know when you teach.

One other thing: Caesar was murdered on the 15th of March in 44 B.C. On the Roman calendar; the 15th of some months is called the Ides.

The soothsayer in the play warns, “Beware the Ides of March” to foreshadow Caesar’s death. But the kids never quite got that Ides thing. In several papers, students wrote about the Eyes of March.

Here’s looking at you!  
 
Rachel Wright is a native of Eden and a part-time instructor in basic skills at Rockingham Community College.