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The BUSS Program

The British Universities Summer Scholarship (BUSS) program will provide a scholarship for a local high-school teacher to attend a summer-study program at Oxford University or the Globe Centre in London.  Course work at these institutions includes the study of Shakespeare in Performance, Shakespeare and His Times, and Strategies in Teaching Shakespeare. We believe the BUSS program and the Shakespeare Competition will synergistically interact.  The opportunity to receive such a scholarship should increase teacher interest and/or proficiency in teaching Shakespeare. It should also encourage more high-school teachers to offer a course on Shakespeare.  Together these will allow more and better prepared students the opportunity to enter the Shakespeare Competition.

The BUSS program has been successful in many Branches throughout the country.  It has only been offered twice in Tucson, several years ago, and was discontinued, probably because of its cost.  We hope to overcome this obstacle by:
bullet Obtaining continuing sponsorships from charitable foundations.
bulletHolding fund-raising concerts
bulletEncouraging our members to continue their strong support of the Shakespeare Competition and BUSS programs

It is interesting to calculate the number of students who will benefit from BUSS over a five-year period.  We assume each teacher benefits from attending the summer school.  We also assume each teacher interacts with 150 students during a school year. (This is determined by assuming the teacher only teaches Shakespeare, or another topic covered by the study scholarship, for one semester per school year, that the number of classes taught is five and the number of students per class is 30.  In some cases the number of students could be 300, or double the 150 used in this example.) So, over a five-year period, the first teacher’s experience benefits 750 students.  The next year another teacher wins the scholarship, which in turn enhances the education of 600 students during the remaining four years of the five-year period, and so on.  At the end of the five-year period, 2,250 students in southern Arizona will have benefited and, in addition, we should probably have attracted more high-school teachers and students to participate in the Shakespeare Competition.

 

 

Oh, what learning is!