This must be why there is such a vast amount of material created about American teenagers. The heady mix of freedom and age creates stories full of wildness and mistakes. Young peoples’ stories are powerful for everyone, in part because everyone was, once, young and can recall the extremities of feeling and events of those days. The stakes are always high for teens and these mistakes can be fascinatingly enormous. I’ve been watching a TV show that revolves around a high school and it reminds me of the fragility of that time, with painful accuracy.
I was not so wild or wanton. I stayed within the lines for the most part but my friends fell down constantly. Many were wanton. Many were wild. There were those that slipped with drugs, those that slipped with drink, those that slipped with displaced sexuality, those that slipped into self harm. My companions were those that slipped so perhaps I can say that I slipped in trying to rescue those that were slipping. I fell down once or twice, with my hand extended to a friend.

Are you more concerned with how the students look than what they’ve learned?
Are you worried about how the students’ performance will reflect on you?
Do you care more about the image of learning or the learning itself?
Real learning is messy. It does not always line up in good straight lines and say its lines correctly.
It does not demonstrate itself in well-coiffed hair and unified choreography.
I think about those prison videos
The ones where they get hundreds of prisoners
To dance in precisely choreographed numbers.
To fulfill someone’s vision, they have all fallen in line –
And it is remarkable, truly. It is moving to watch huge numbers of people in sync.
But it is totalitarian. It looks good. It looks magic –
But no one but the one in charge got to have a thought for himself.
No one (but the one in charge) exercised his creativity
No one (but the one in charge) used his imagination
No one (but the one in charge) had any agency over his own body, or thoughts, or art or song or dance.

When we learned how to walk, we fell down a lot.
We landed on our asses. We didn’t look good.
And no one else cared either.
The important thing was the walking.
So it is with anything we learn.
We have to fall on our asses a bit
We have to look ridiculous.

Who’s got a dis-honor-o-meter?
It’s little arrow moves according to the rankness of the bad behavior.
Apparently, for Polonius, gaming, drinking, fencing, quarrelling
Are low on the dis-honor-o-meter.
Drabbing, AKA whoring, is a little higher up the scale but still well within honorable range.
For Reynaldo, drabbing is clearly hitting the red of his dis-honor-o-meter.
Where does lying fall on the dis-honor-o-meter?
Spying? Gossiping?

Asking someone with questionable moral character
To improvise a character assassination
Is a bit like asking someone who just loves murdering
To just take a chunk out of someone.
I’m making an assumption, of course, about Reynaldo’s character.
I’m assuming that, because Polonius is giving him spy work that he’s not the MOST moral of men.
Anyway, which forgeries would please Reynaldo to put upon Laertes? Has he been looking for an opportunity to impugn him? Is this a moment for a vivid imagination to cut loose and paint a picture of a man debauched and wild ? Polonius figures he’ll let him improvise.
He doesn’t want to put limitations on the lying artist.

Addicted seems a very modern word here in this context. Addiction seems like a modern construct even though surely, people have had addictions through the ages. Alcohol, drugs, etc are all very ancient and surely control over them hasn’t likely changed much for those early eras. But I can’t think of another instance of the word “addiction” in classical literature, which makes me wonder if a) addiction meant something different then than it does now or b) this is one of those words that Shakespeare coined.

I’ve grown tired of making children listen. I don’t talk much when teaching; My aim is 2% of Me Talking, 98% of them DOING.
But even so, I spend a great deal of every day asking questions like this. It’s a dumb question. I know the answer. It’s no – even though they will SAY yes.

We never see them but I get a sense that Laertes has some good friends.
Polonius suggests that Reynaldo claim connections to them (and himself) to gain some legitimacy and later, Laertes almost stages a successful coup. He must have a lot of friends and supportive ones at that.
Or if there aren’t a LOT of them, they’re very loyal. So loyal that they’d stage a coup for him. The fewer of them there are, the more loyal they must be.
They may be a little riotous but they seem to have Laertes’ back.
I’m not sure what trouble Polonius thinks his son is getting into – if he’s thinking drinking, swearing, quarreling, gaming or drabbing isn’t going too far to dishonor him. Or maybe he’s looking for evidence of those very things?
I picture Laertes a little bit like a frat boy, surrounded by a tight knit group of drinking buddies who get up to mischief wherever they go but will band together the instant anything gets serious.

Encompassment? Really Polonius?
How is this drift of question an encompassment? It sounds like a pretty direct line. Exactly what would Reynaldo be circling around?
I guess he’s getting the lock down on what all the Danskers are up to but encompassing it?
But once again, I think Polonius is using a 5 dollar word where a penny word will do. Speaking of 5 dollar words, I looked up this expression recently and discovered that there is no set amount to express this idea.
There are 10 dollar words, 4 dollar words, 3, 2, 1. There are 25 cent words.
It can be hard to tell if 25 cent words are meant to be big or small ones. I suspect there has been some inflation of the value of words – that is, the ones that are perceived to be unnecessarily fancy have grown from 10 cent words to twenty five cent words to dollar words and so on.
It’s a drift of value, of expense and expression. But a penny will hold as a word that accomplishes the same thing but more simply and clearly.
10 cent, 25 cent, dollar and ten dollar words depend on use, too – who is using them and why. Hamlet uses loads of big words, fancy ones, with lots of syllables, but they never seem like ten dollar words in his mouth. They seem like the right ones – but Polonius, Polonius uses big words and they stand out as big words, as a man using words, not to express something but to impress or to create an image of an intelligent man. He uses more words than he needs, as many an academic, politician or obfuscator of meaning will.

Where exactly is Reynaldo going to get this intelligence?
That’s a lot of information to get about visitors to a city.
I can see that at a bar you might find a bartender who’s seen some Danes go through there because maybe they serve good Danish beer and maybe that bartender could tell you if they tip well and who they hang out with – but how they are in Paris, with whom, where their money comes from and where they live and how much it costs, Well, that seems a lot for a casual contact to know.
Is there perhaps a tourist bureau that keeps tabs on visiting Danes? Do they have careful records filed away in their books just in case someone needs to round them up one day? Perhaps, as a bit of a spy himself, Polonius has contacts with Parisian spies who will share information for a price.

In my edition, Reynaldo is listed as Polonius’ “man” which might indicate a valet or a servant of some kind but not specifically.
I have questions about this – because why is Polonius calling his servant “sir”?
Sirrah, okay, that’s a servant, sure – but sir?
Sir, would seem to me to be a title among equals or betters.
Granted, I am not an expert in titles. I have not closely examined who calls who sir throughout the canon but every example that comes immediately to mind fall in the category of equals.
“Do you quarrel, sir?”
“Quarrel, sir, no sir.”
A couple of ruffians and servants, sure – but equals.
Rosalind to Orlando: “Sir, you have wrestled well.”
Equals.
I don’t know – Sir shows up a LOT in the plays. A LOT.
Who’s got the numbers and statuses?