Milwaukee - Anything but “Hamlet,” I kept telling myself as I walked down towards my IB English oral with IB English II teacher Kelly O’Keefe-Boettcher.

My junior year consisted of mostly “Hawthorne’s Short Stories” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka and “Darkness at Noon” by Arthur Koestler. We spent a small amount of time on “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston. I barely knew what happened in “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare at the end of the school year.

I picked “Hamlet.” I was not the only one. Two others with the same junior teacher also picked “Hamlet” soliloquies. I know I was not the only person terrified of picking “Hamlet,” the only play we read barely half of in my junior year.

IB English Seniors spend the entire first semester of IB English II reading John Donne, Seamus Heaney, Margaret Atwood and Dr. Martin Luther King to prepare for the IB Oral Commentary.

My prep time would have been more satisfying had it not been during a lunch hour, nor in the basement in a hallway just outside the wrestling mat room.

At first the room was quiet except for a urinal flushing every five minutes. Annotating the soliloquy did not turn out to be hard since we had gone over them in class the week before. With my pen ready and my paper smoothed out to begin my outline, the banging on the walls and singing in the halls began, letting me know lunch was over.

I never realized how unaware other students are of the International Baccalaureate Programme.

My concentration was thrown off, and all I could hear was the MPS beat as Jeremy Nichols, social studies teacher, calls it.

Thump thump. Thumpthump. Thumpthumpthump. Over and over. At least it was not followed by the normal “Ay! Ay! Ay!”

Yes, O’Keefe-Boettcher allowed her students to schedule orals. Yes, I realize I scheduled my oral during a lunch hour, but not everyone at Rufus King was aware of the IB Orals going on.

So much for that picture on the wall that Hamlet was speaking about. Twenty minutes turned into one minute, and before I knew it, my time was up.

It was time. I had a general structure, but I was unsatisfied with it.

According to O’Keefe-Boettcher, she would have never realized that I had not read the book.

Without her instruction this year, I honestly do not know how I would have handled getting “Hamlet.”

But I still would have enjoyed my IB oral experience without the beats, the singing and the random urinal flushing.