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

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

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