To be honest, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s classic short story “Harrison Bergeron” kind of rubs me the wrong way.  It feels dated, cynical, and mean-spirited—and the one example of resistance is focused mostly on how physically attractive Harrison and the ballerina are. Harrison tries to dissent, but his rebellion hardly gives students a good example of what to do when faced with an oppressive government. And it ends on a depressing note with people just going along with the status quo.

I have always loved American Literature. It’s just so fresh, exciting, and inspiring—from Gothic horror to contemporary Native poetry, from immigration stories to feminist sonnets, from jazz-inspired poetry to accounts of the witch trials. Yet the more time you spend reading American literature, the more you realize that so much of our greatest writing comes from moments we’d rather forget. It’s a relatively short history, but it’s one full of injustice, cruelty, and just plain shameful acts.  So how do

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

Act 3 is where Romeo and Juliet really starts to speed up—the body count starts to build, the cycle of violence seems unending, and Juliet moves towards the only solution she (thinks) she has to solve her problems. This is also the point in the play where students should be invested enough in the characters and interested enough in the ideas that they don’t need gimmicks to relate or be engaged—and where your role as a teacher shifts from trying

Personally, I love anything Shakespeare. But I’ve 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 his sonnets. Shakespeare’s sonnets are great for teaching for so many reasons—they’re master classes on why humans use figurative language; they’re dense enough to reward close reading without forcing students through chapters and chapters of text; and

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

When you think of Shakespeare’s classic play, you might not think it has much to do with the iPhone-wielding students in your class, but I’ve found that students connect more than you’d expect to the young Dane and the struggles he faces. There are so many great questions to tackle: What happens to us when we die? Do the ends justify the means? Why do we put things off, especially when it matters most?    Still, this play is not

Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet contains what is arguably the most iconic scene in English literature. And yet, simply telling students that this moment matters doesn’t actually make them care about what they’re reading. This is also the point in the unit when students should be gaining confidence and independence with the text.  And yet, shaking your beloved underlined copy of the book at them and saying, “you should get this by now!” isn’t exactly a winning strategy. The

Quizzes on Romeo and Juliet are one of those things I know I need to give—but I also kind of dread.  I want to know if my students are understanding the play, to see if I need to change things up, to get some grades in my grade books, and yeah, to be honest, I want to catch that kid in the back of the room who said he was paying attention when I’m pretty sure he was not.  

Romeo and Juliet can be a great play to teach because so many of the essential questions are still relevant today. What does it mean to be “cool,” and why is coolness often related to a transgression of the rules? Is violence ever justified? What are some of the misconceptions about gangs and people who belong to gangs? But that doesn’t mean that it’s always easy to get students to think about those questions on a deeper level. If your