Ticking Mind

Ticking Mind’s new edition of Macbeth (ISBN: 978-0-9944258-5-0) takes a revolutionary approach to presenting this staple of High School English classrooms. Unlike conventional Macbeth textbooks which only support students to understand that ‘gist’ of a scene or the whole play, Ticking Mind’s textbook breaks each scene into digestible 30 line chunks which scaffold students to actively understand the language and imagery at work in Shakespeare’s play. In addition to this, the textbook provides explicit instruction to students on how to annotate text, and on the counter side of each page of Shakespeare’s text, features short thinking activities which can create the framework for powerful class discussions about each part of each scene. To teach students to ultimately write about this text, Ticking Mind’s textbook does not include boring comprehension questions at the end of each scene, but scaffolded analytic writing procedures which improve students vocabulary, sentence structure skills and capacity to analyse the text. Important illustrations of themes and images in the text of the play are also signposted with icons that students can easily use to search for evidence when they are writing an essay on the text – a procedure which is explicitly taught at the end of the textbook.