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 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

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

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