I know I love anything Shakespeare, but I have also been teaching long enough to know that just hearing me say “No, I promise, it’s going to be so good!” is not enough to get the average teen to wade into the depth of a Shakespeare sonnet. The truth is that Shakespeare’s sonnets can be extraordinary classroom texts—funny, sharp, honest, and surprisingly modern—but only if students are given a way in. Not a lecture on Elizabethan vocabulary, not a diagram

I love teaching Shakespeare’s over-the-top tale of two teens who get caught up in a death-obsessed, violence-soaked world.  Romeo and Juliet is the first Shakespeare play for many students because it feels so relatable.   But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to teach. The language is hard for students.  The story is old.  Then there’s the barrier of knowing it’s Shakespeare— and we know how difficult that guy is.  Add to all this the pressure of not just getting through

Teaching writing often feels less like following a logical order and more like making constant decisions about what to fix first. Should you get students to work on paragraphs when their sentences are weak? Why focus on elegant sentence writing when their stories have no point? And how can you talk about conclusions when they don’t even know how to write a first sentence? What finally helped me to stop spinning out on all the ways my students’ writing needed

When Shirley Jackson first published “The Lottery,” her mother told her in a letter, “This gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days.” It’s been seventy-eight years since that letter, and given the world they have inherited, young people are still thinking about gloomy stories. Yet it’s easy to teach this classic story as nothing more than a shocking twist ending set safely in the past. Whether we like it or not, the question

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s masterpiece of a short story touches on so many different and fascinating themes, but it’s not exactly an easy story for most teens to get into.  This tale of an imprisoned housewife who slowly goes insane as she becomes more and more obsessed with the wallpaper in her summer rental is confusing, seemingly random, and on the surface, plotless.   As one contemporary of Gilman said, it’s “enough to drive anyone mad to read it.” Add to

I first started teaching Annie John in the early 2000s, and it’s always been a surprise to me that it’s not more of a staple in high school English Classes.  With themes of growing up and coming of age, it’s such a classic choice for teens, and yet it doesn’t focus on white boys and their problems, and so it’s refreshing and compelling.  (Now that I think about it, maybe that’s the real reason why it isn’t taught more often….)

Just about every high school student will take American Literature at some point in their lives.  What I remember from my high school experience was reading a bunch of dead white males whose experiences and ideas really had no relevance to my life.  (Don’t get me wrong—I love a good description of a sinner hanging like a spider over the fires of hell, but there’s just so much more to explore!) I think that where teachers often go wrong is

How do you teach students to actually understand how figurative language or other literary elements function to create meaning in a text? In my experience, the higher the level of thinking you require from your students, the more they’ll benefit by a breaking down of the steps to get there.  Sure, every once in a while you’ll come across a kid who can just naturally and effortlessly analyze a literary text, but honestly that’s like one in a thousand.