Poetry units often fail before they begin. The mistake that dooms them is that they are poorly planned and the marketing is terrible.  PLANNING Many poetry units emphasize building students’ poetic terminology without putting as much attention on the experience of reading a poem. While vocabulary certainly helps to articulate things we identify in poems, … Continue Reading

1. Master the art of eye contact. Make ’em feel seen. Look long enough to see eye color, then you can look away. 2. Make it obvious and apparent how much you care. It cab be a grand act or a series of small gestures. But they have to know. 3. You can be the … Continue Reading

At their core, AP English Literature essays aren’t about telling readers everything you read this year—they’re about proving you can make a clear, persuasive interpretation of the prompt and support it with thoughtful analysis. The exam is not based on your memory of the works of literature you studied, rather it is about applying the … Continue Reading

The textbook I used early in my career encouraged students to think of characterization in a binary way — either it was direct or indirect. The definitions went something like this: Direct characterization is a literary technique in which a narrator or another character explicitly describes a character’s traits, qualities, or personality. Instead of allowing … Continue Reading

SUSAN BARBER Not taking work home has become a hard fast rule for me, but this was not always the case. I spent years carrying essays on field trips to my house, my children’s sporting events and arts performances, after school events, faculty meetings – you get the idea. The bag of essays was an … Continue Reading

 SUSAN BARBER I remember when ChatGPT broke on TikTok in late 2022 and feared how this would play out in classrooms. My concerns were validated when over 50 students suddenly used the work “evocative” in their first online essays in January of 2023. Since then, AI has continued to evolve, students have become adept at … Continue Reading

Teaching older novels has become quite the intimidating thing. After all, last November, The Atlantic declared that even elite college students aren’t reading, and if those kids can’t read whole novels, what hope is there for high school English teachers?  I have found a way to teach an 18th-century novel without losing my students to … Continue Reading

“that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The dark arts that can conspire against a teacher typically manifest for me when the clocks are changing.  I start the year hyper-focused on knowing every student’s name by the second day because I want them to know that I genuinely care about them as individuals. I’ve set it up so that each day brings … Continue Reading

Maybe it is all just clickbait, luring us into a paranoia for an impending doom. In the past few months, The Atlantic has published America is Sliding Toward Illiteracy and The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. The New York Times has its own doomsday submission with 12th Grade Reading Skills Hit a New … Continue Reading