Little Chunks or One Huge Swoosh?

N.T. Wright says a couple of fairly inarguable things here.  For example, he says that the apostle Paul wrote letters to the different Christian groups, and that these letters don't make much sense, actually, if each one is not read as a whole thing.  In churches, frequently they are read in little bits over the course of months.  If you never read them start to finish, you only tackle little chunks which you are almost certain to misinterpret, misapply, or generally miss the point of.  Much more likely if you get into some kind of attempt at deep analysis, when you don't have the whole rest of the book, in overview, in your head to match it up against.
  Now, I'm teaching Shakespeare this year (Macbeth) and I'm teaching the 20th Century also.  I'm doing something that's quite different from many of the other teachers.  The more years I do what I do (the way I do it) the more what they do looks nonsensical to me, and the more what I do looks equally nonsensical to them.

My Theory (Context Before Content)
 Here's my theory, as simply as I can put it: before you should weigh the kids' arms down, mentally speaking, with huge unwieldy loads of specific information about something, they need the Big Picture.  Like, a context to put those things in. Otherwise they'll "drop" them all.  So, before you explain what you think are deeper themes in Act 2 of Macbeth, and what happens there, in a whole lot of detail, and get into foreshadowing and symbols and stuff, you should make sure the kids are equipped with an overview of the whole thing that these details slot into.
  If you're teaching the minutiae of the First World War and what caused it and what effect it had, and you're going into a great deal of depth, if the kids don't even know what the main events before or after it were, they do not have in their heads what's in yours as you're teaching.  They need an overview of the century first. Then the details.
  If you're going to argue about what you think Romans 7 means, and you haven't read Romans 6 or Romans 8 recently, or if you read Romans 6 last week and aren't thinking of it very much that's not good.  If you and have forgotten chapters 5,4,3 and so on to an increasing degree, going backward, and have not yet heard what will be said in Romans 8, 9 and 10, but you're still delving deeply into 7, you might wanna rethink that.  Do the whole book, then go digging in the bits.
  So with the 20th Century, in my history class we did the whole century, in terms of main events, first.  Almost no detail. Then we did the whole century in terms of civil rights events only. (women getting the vote, the victories against the Klan in the American south and so on).  Now we are doing the whole century in terms of inventions and new technology. 
  The old system of taking from September right up until Christmas to move at a snail's pace from the First World War, through the Roaring Twenties and great Depression, then arrive at the Second, talking about Hilter and the Holocaust for the first time while the snow is making a cushy carpet and Christmas carols are in the air?  When no one can bring Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War or Iraq into the discussion, because we haven't got there yet, and won't really have time to "get there" at all before the end of the course?  I don't want to teach that way.  When I'm done teaching technology (including the development of military, vehicular, medical and communications technology over the course of all the wars) I'll teach the whys, wherefores and hows of the wars, and the economics of the century as well.  Will I rush? Will I stress Big Picture over individual facts?  I sure will.  But I actually don't have five classes to study the Treaty of Versailles.  I just don't.  Not without pulling a bonehead move like skipping teaching about little things like, oh, the Internet.  Had a bit of an effect on the world, one might argue.  Might have some effect on historical research and study.
   Does this method risk one putting one's own slant on causes and effects, outcomes, and change, with all the summarizing?  Of course.  But we do that anyway when teaching history.  All the time.  And kids watching Romeo and Juliet, or 1984 (or the twentieth century) 'go by' terribly, terribly slowly, as a teacher pads out each one by, for instance, saying more words about Romeo and Juliet than are actually in Romeo and Juliet?  Not terribly effective, I don't feel.

What I'm Not Doing, And What I'm Doing Instead

Some teachers teach about the historical period when Shakespeare was writing, and about England, and the Globe Theatre and all of that.  I don't give a toss about that.  I teach Shakespeare as a guy who wrote a whole body of work, and what it was, and what it was like.  I have a collection of 20 minute British children's cartoon adaptations of Shakespearean plays.  Every Friday leading up to doing Macbeth, the kids get to pick two, and we watch two every Friday, including the cartoon of Macbeth, which we'll be reading.  (that's a no-no.  How can they be expected to read the play if they've already seen a cartoon of it?)  My kids have to write, just from these kinds of cartoons, what Shakespeare, as a writer, is like. What is the overall structure of his tragedies?  His comedies?  It becomes easy. It becomes "Oh, Shakespeare?  Yeah, I know what HE does.  Can't fool me. This is a tragedy, so at the end the stage will be filled with bodies. He always does that.  Oh, and this is a comedy, so at the end almost every single character will all get married. He always does that too."
  Then we watch the 70s movie of Macbeth, with the subtitles on, so almost every word in the entire play is acted, by a professional, with the subtitles up to be glanced at, for the kids.  This is better than the cartoon, but now they already feel they understand the characters and plot and setting too.  If they complain "I'm confused," then they look much less justified, having already seen a children's cartoon of the basics.  They say, "Oh, that's Banquo right there on that horse. He was bald in the other one."  Then I play a small documentary in which Shakespeare experts with actual PhDs wax opinionated about what they think about Macbeth, differing quite consciously from stuff that high school teachers often teach (the thought "in a tragedy, the hero has a tragic flaw" is a notable example of something the eggheads think is a particularly stupid thing to teach children).  I myself am not a Shakespeare expert with a PhD, and tend to agree with those guys.
  Then, the kids get to get into groups and read/act out the play.  There are definitely years when especially the slacker kids and their groups do not finish acting out the whole thing by exam time because every time you turn your back, they're just holding the books but not reading.  So they get told to read it at home themselves, to prepare for the exam.  And if they can't be bothered, neither can I.
  What is generally done is rather different than what I do: the teacher waxes didactic on the Globe Theatre, and Elizabethans and stuff (Macbeth is set in a different country, in a different time, of course, which may be relevant), then reads the play aloud/has the kids read it aloud as a large class-sized group with many kids sleeping through this part, as there are far more kids in the class than can read at once, and the teacher keeps interrupting the play to lecture, explain, lecture, explain.  So Macbeth takes like a week or two.  Now, if you went to see Macbeth, in the original, theatrical version, rather than semi-literate adolescents reading the script, it wouldn't take more than an evening.

Authentic?
But it's viewed as "authentic" for the kids to read the script of the play before seeing the movie.  Horror is expressed that I show the movie first.  How can I say they read the play at all if they've seen it performed?
  I ask "How "authentic" is that?  The Hobbit is out in two weeks.  What if I said to my kids, now, you need to read the script first.  You can watch the movie when you're done. How can you claim to have truly watched the movie if you haven't read the script?  (How can you, in fact, eat your pudding if you don't eat your meat?  Go on, do it again!)  And I need to teach you everything you need to know about Oxford, J.R.R. Tolkien, the battle of the Somme, the horrors of the First and Second World Wars, the atomic bomb, and all the settings and races of Middle Earth (with a class or two showing from where in Beowulf and Norse mythology Tolkien cribbed his stuff).  Then you can watch the movie.  If we have time.  That?  Would be ridiculous."
  I am terribly popular in the English department.
  Because ultimately, Macbeth is a play.  Intended to be watched with perhaps a brief intermission, start to finish.  The mythic short attention spans of modern children are hardly assuaged by making it take a week or two.  In what form was Macbeth intended, by William Shakespeare, to be enjoyed, if I may use that word?  As a script read by the worst readers in modern history, or as a performance by professionals?

Ridiculous
Romans, the part of the bible, is a letter.  It isn't intended to be read over the course of two months.  Ridiculous.  It certainly isn't intended to be lectured ad nauseam upon, when 'we' are three weeks away from even seeing what comes next.  It is a letter. Intended to be read as a whole and then perhaps gone over afterward.
  With the 20th Century, we're screwed, though.  Centuries are to be lived, and absolutely no one lives a whole one and is fully cognizant throughout those entire hundred years, starting in the first year.  Yet I apply the same idea to history class. Making it seem to actually take one hundred years to teach grade 10 history doesn't seem to be my best idea.
  I'm going bigger.  Am I drilling down to the same depths of detailed analysis?  Nope.  Don't care.  They keep asking us to teach everything important that happened from 1900 forward, and then with every passing decade there's yet another decade to cover and put into context and decide what's important in.  And the kids who are arriving each semester aren't being educated the way they used to be.  They have more and more huge gaping holes in their overall understanding, and less and less ability to draw connections.  So I teach connections, hitting the actual people, places and things I'm connecting, one to another, while I do that.  It's not perfect.  But it's what I'm doing and I'm happier.

When I Was 12
When I was 12, my dad offered our Sunday School class $20 to whoever would read the whole bible.  I read it.  At the time, I thought I was cheating, as I was reading through it pretty quickly.  I wasn't getting caught in the details.  I had to get through it.
  Thing is?  Now I end up getting into arguments with people who've done painfully in-depth study of a whole series of tiny bits of the bible.  And they don't have any kind of big picture.  You talk about Paul as a writer, or Romans as a book; and compare Romans as a book to James as a book, written by James, who was really different from Paul, but quite like Jude (and Jesus, actually. The three might have been brothers, actually.)  And they can't seem to connect.  Trouble is, maybe they've never read those books in just one or two sittings, ever.  They've read instructive, excised snippets.  Useful for building religions from.
  Even more commonly?  They've never read the whole bible.  At all.  Increasingly, when I ask bible students if they've read the whole thing, it's something they think they really ought to do, if they can find the time between studying (about) it.
  So you try to talk about anything in general, especially if some person is drilling holes in the bible, and it's like you're speaking Greek.  (and not New Testament Greek, either).  And they're back with the magnifying glass, assuming you're missing stuff when you talk to them. Because they can do so much more detail on their few expert bits than you can.
  Well, they're missing stuff too.  Including the very fact that they're missing anything, or that you have anything to say too.