Naomi Pate has been an inspiration to me since I started teaching in Atlanta; her enthusiasm and love for life is contagious. She teaches English and journalism at Maynard Jackson High School in Atlanta, GA. She is also an ambassador for the Atlanta Track Club, so if you’re ever running a race in Atlanta, keep your eyes out for her.
1. Walk us through a great lesson from last week.
My students read an article that criticized the administration of the SAT. We read and annotated together, and I allowed them to express their thoughts as we went through the article. It was the first time I saw my students connect with the text. It was one of my favorite teacher moments this year as my class had been so reluctant to hold discussions. I look forward to bringing them more articles that will encourage them to think and speak.
This year, I have had to rethink my teaching. I moved from a suburban to urban school, left a 4×4 block where I had my AP students everyday all year and now teach on an A/B block only seeing my students every other day, and I have five sections of AP Literature this year – yes, five – with students representing a wide range of skills and abilities. While I have always been a proponent of choice reading, independent novels have been a huge savior for me this year. The thought is I can work on elements of poetry, prose, close reading, etc. during my reduced time with students, yet students are still responsbile for reading and building their bank of novels for Q3.
In December, my students read a dystopian choice novel. By giving the parameters of dystopian, we were able as a whole class to focus on the genre. We began the unit reviewing the characteristics of dystopia literature talking through the different types of dystopias with a presentation I made using the information from Read, Write, Think. Commonly chosen books in the class included:
As a basketball coach, March is one of my favorite months.
Anytime I turn on the tv, there is a great college basketball game. Duke-North Carolina, Kentucky-Tennessee, Michigan-Michigan State. Conference tournaments. And, of course, the big dance of them all, the NCAA Tournament.
March is also one of my favorite months in the classroom.
Each year I do an NCAA-bracket style March Madness.
It has taken on many different forms over the years, and there are modifications you can do, but the version that I like best is Poetry March Madness.
POETRY MARCH MADNESS
In the NCAA college basketball 68 teams compete in a single-elimination, bracket-style challenge to determine the national champion.
In my class, we spend the month of March reading 32 poems, all of which compete in a single-elimination, bracket-style challenge to determine a class champion.
The month has two broad goals:
to provide the means for my students to appreciate poetry, especially those that say they don’t like it
to give students a framework to understand poetry
Before I get into the progression of how I set it up, what happens each day in class, and what the students do, here is an overview of some key elements in the unit.
32 poems are involved
We vote in class each day on a bracket (sometimes two brackets early on)
The unit takes about a month to complete
students will build skills incrementally throughout the unit, first learning how to identify a poem’s subject/theme, then its tone, its poetic techniques, and finally how to write about poetry.
students will develop their own internal rubric for poetic excellence
PREP WORK
The first thing I do is find 32 poems that my students have not read. You can use this list of 100 poems for inspiration. Also, at the end of the post, you can see my bracket for this year as weak as all my resources and materials for this unit.
Once I have the 32 poems, I have the students make the brackets. BIG BRACKETS! I’m talking about four huge pieces of paper taped together BIG. The students measure the paper, do the math on the spacing, and mark all the lines.
Each class’s bracket go up on the back wall.
Here is what it looks like:
THE LEARNING OBJECTIVE FOR EACH ROUND
1st Round (32 poems, 16 brackets)— For the first-round bracket, we have a discussion that focuses on the subject/theme of each poem. I hand out my 50 Common Themes in Literature worksheet. We sit in a circle, each student provides their answer, and I record the tallies on each poem. Once we have the main subjects identified for each poem, we have a discussion that includes a summary of each poem, lines that we like, lines that gave us trouble, and at the end of the period, a vote on the superior poem.
There is a good pedagogical reason why I start with subject/theme. A few years ago, members of the AP Literature exam developed a PowerPoint slide with suggested areas of improvement for teachers and students. It provided advice culled from the millions of essays read over the past few years for each of the three essay questions. One of the most important pieces of advice that it provided for the poetry essay was that it was not enough to merely identify literary or poetic devices. Students should always connect those devices back to meaning.
This reinforced what I was seeing in my own classroom and in my years of experience as an AP Reader. Students could identify the simile or personification in a poem. They could explain the comparison or the human quality that was given. But all too often, they did not show how that simile or use of personification enhanced the meaning of the poem. They did not see how technique added to the complexity of the poem. Meaning and complexity were absent in their writing.
This is what separated upper-level essays from lower-level ones. Upper-level essays could explain the impact the device had on meaning.
As a result, I begin the first round with a discussion of subject/theme because I want my students to have that conceptual framework first. I want them to be able to identify the subject or theme of a poem, and then see how everything else is there in service of it.
The 16 brackets typically takes two weeks.
Once I model what we do with the poems in class, I am comfortable asking them to do the same for homework for the next bracket so that we can cover two brackets a day. This is how we get through 32 poems and 16 brackets in two weeks.
Here’s an example of a first-round poem with brief annotations and tally marks for the subjects the students identified.
2nd Round (16 poems, 8 brackets) — During the second round students see poems the second time. They already have an understanding of the poems, so we develop a more complex appreciation by examining tone. I want my students to understand the speaker’s attitude toward the subject and determine the effect it has on the poem.
On the multiple-choice section of the exam, my students are weak on tone because their vocabulary isn’t broad-ranging to consistently score well. Throughout the course of this week, we are looking at shifts in tone, we are identifying the right word (check out this post on teaching tone), and we are discussing the impact tone has on the overall effect of the poem.
I use a list of 35 tone words that I created years ago. Vocabulary.com also has a good list of AP tone words.
3rd Round (8 poems, 4 brackets) — A this point, the discussions and voting get progressively intense. Students have an attachment for certain poems. They are rooting for an underdog. They have a favorite that they want to go far.
During the third round, and with only eight poems remaining, we focus on poetic technique. Finally, they can do their scavenger hunt for similes, metaphors, images, paradoxes, ironies and other techniques used by the poet to enhance complexity and meaning.
This is where the work of the first two rounds will really pay off. When the students find those devices, I’m going to challenge them to analyze how those techniques influence the meaning. I’m going to push them to see the way in which they impact the tone.
In essence, I asking them to see the layers of complexity and determine how those parts accumulate to influence the whole of the poem.
4th round (4 poems, 2 brackets) — In the final four, I ask the students to write a well-developed essay for each bracket explaining why they believe one poem is superior. They must analyze the parts of the poem and explain how those parts influence the meaning. In addition, they must explain the personal significance of the poem, detailing why its thematic power is significant to them.
Final round (2 poems, 1 bracket) — Rather than write another essay, we have a whole class discussion, which really turns into a debate on the merits of the final two poems. Both are exceptional, but there can only be one winner.
When the discussion has reached and end, we do a secret ballot and I read the votes while a student puts the tally marks on the board. I’m trying to create as much suspense and anticipation as possible because many of the students have become attached to these poems over the course of the unit.
Alternatives — There are others ways to do March Madness in the classroom. Here are some ideas:
If you are short on time, you can do a one-day review of 32 things that you have read throughout the year to find out what the students liked best
history teachers have read my Edutopia March Madness post and were inspired to do a Dictator March Madness to determine to most ruthless dictator in history
32 works of art, music, etc.
Presidential March Madness to determine who was the best president in U.S. history
March Madness quotes in which you pull 32 quotes from the things that you have read to determine which was the most enduring and impactful
I am a huge proponent of choice reading, but sometimes the whole class novel is necessary. A common text allows us to think through character development, plot and structure, and thematic ideas over the course of a few hundred pages and a few weeks. This slow burn and thinking on one central work usually has a large pay off.
Because of my schedule – modified block – I don’t have the opportunity to do several whole class novels in AP. I tend to have students read a couple of choice books – one at the beginning and another near the end of the year – and we will read a couple of shorter plays (Fences is up next). We really only have time for one longer whole class text. The temptation is to move quickly so we can “squeeze in more curriculum” but in reality the best thing is to slow down and lean fully into the work.
Before I became a teacher I dreamed about my classroom. I imagined my students arriving each day with anticipation in their eyes and wonder in their hearts. I envisioned a room with hands in the air, thoughtful discussions, and signs of fascination and curiosity. I pictured students glued to their seats when the bell rang because they didn’t want the learning to stop.
Nowhere in my dreams did I plan. I only thought about the results, not the preparation. I only envisioned what my classroom would look like and feel like. I never considered all the grunt work that needed to be done to get there.
As Benjamin Franklin said, “by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
Alexis Wiggins, a veteran teacher turned instructional coach, wrote a viral blog post in 2014, sharing her experience shadowing a student for two days. This instructional coach was a student in the fullest sense. She copied notes along with the students. She took the test along with students. When it was time to work in groups, she was right there in the mix along with the students.
Instead of finding classrooms where learning is fun, captivating, and so contagious that even the worst students loved coming to class, she found something else. What she saw and what she experienced was sobering.
Her three biggest takeaways were that learning was sedentary, passive, and stressful.
I’m going to quote a big chunk of her blog post because I want you to feel what it is like for the student when planning takes a back seat.
Key Takeaway #1 Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.
I literally sat down the entire day, except for walking to and from classes. We forget as teachers, because we are on our feet a lot – in front of the board, pacing as we speak, circling around the room to check on student work, sitting, standing, kneeling down to chat with a student as she works through a difficult problem…we move a lot. But students move almost never. And never is exhausting.
Key Takeaway #2 High school students are listening during approximately 90% of their classes.
I asked my tenth-grade host, Cindy, if she felt like she made important contributions to class or if, when she was absent, the class missed out on the benefit of her knowledge or contributions, and she laughed and said no.
I was struck by this takeaway in particular because it made me realize how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are directing or choosing.
Key takeaway #3 You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.
I lost count of how many times we were told to be quiet and pay attention. It’s normal to do so – teachers have a set amount of time and we need to use it wisely. But in shadowing, throughout the day, you start to feel sorry for the students who are told over and over again to pay attention because you understand part of what they are reacting to is sitting and listening all day
No one plans for this result. No one hopes that their lessons are less about content and more about micromanaging behavior. No one wants their students to sit passively for 40-50 minutes, not doing much other than checking their cell phones every five minutes to stave off boredom. No one wants their students to feel distanced from their own education with little to no autonomy in the formative years of their lives.
No one wants this, least of all the students. But it happens. It is happening in a lot of classrooms.
So why is it so hard to plan great lessons that engage students, activate critical thinking, and make learning fun and dynamic?
The struggle is real.
There are three realities every teacher must confront when it comes to planning.
It takes an exhaustive amount of creative energy to plan exciting and stimulating lessons that are wholly original each day. Between responding to parent emails, completing administrative paperwork, and grading, most teachers don’t have the time during their prep periods to let new ideas germinate and bloom.
It is easy and predictable to keep a routine going and teach the same way. Most teachers face pressure to raise test scores, meet standards, and comply with accommodations and find safety in familiarity.
Even if they want to try something new and vary their teaching, teachers don’t know where to find new ideas and going down the Google rabbit hole is like picking out paint colors at the hardware store — there are so many options that you don’t know which one to choose.
There is a way to overcome all three obstacles and routinely plan amazing lessons. There is a way to make learning exciting and dynamic without sacrificing all your time.
PLAN AMAZING LESSONS
You don’t need to teach all day and stay up all night waiting for the next great idea to strike like a thunderbolt to the forehead. Master teachers know how to find great ideas rather than wait for those ideas to come to them.
They know that to be a great teacher, you have to be a great thief.
It’s a lesson I was lucky to learn early in my career.
When I was student teaching in the early 2000s, I realized that I was following the same teaching routine each day. I would start class with a do now, teach some type of skill in a mini lesson, break the class into small groups so that they could practice the mini lesson, and then bring everyone back together and review so that we had some closure.
It was a format that was working.
The students knew the routine and began working once the bell rang. While I was the sage on the stage teaching a skill early in the period, I quickly turned into the guide on the side when they broke into small groups. Students participated. They shared ideas. It wrapped up with a nice neat closure bow at the end.
But it quickly became stale and predictable.
At one point, I said to my cooperating teacher, “Is this all there is? If I’m starting to get bored with this format, the students must be as students well. There has to be more to teaching.”
His reply put me on an upward trajectory for the rest of my career.
He said, “There is a world of possibilities with a lesson but you’ll burn yourself out if you try to do it all on your own. Your job is to start looking anywhere and everywhere for good ideas. You’ll see them, and once you do, steal them and make them your own.”
STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST
For centuries some of the most famous artists have had their hand in the cookie jar.
The Bard was a master thief. William Shakespeare is known for lifting characters, plot lines, and themes from a wide variety of sources. All those plays you read in high school were not solely the product of his own creativity. They were the result of his ability to transform the good ideas of others into his own spectacular creations.
He nabbed the plot of Romeo and Juliet from Arthur Brooke’s 1562 poem,The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. Saxo Grammaticus chronicled Denmark’s kings and told the story of Amlet in 1200 AD. 400 years later Shakespeare stole it to create Hamlet. Is it coincidence that Hamlet is an anagram of Amleth? When writing Macbeth, Shakespeare hijacked Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, which records the history of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Shakespeare didn’t produce carbon copies of these works. He always stole with the goal of improvingrather than plagiarizing. Yet, we don’t look at Shakespeare as a fraud.
When Steve Jobs visited a Xerox research center in Palo Alto in 1979, he was fascinated by what he saw. Xerox developed three amazing personal computing features. What really caught his eye was the third development. It was a graphical user interface, which allowed personal computer users to click on desktop icons rather than enter lines of code. Immediately after the meeting Jobs drove back to the Apple offices in Cupertino and told everyone,”We’ve got to do it!”
He saw how it could transform personal computing. He saw the future of Apple.
Apple didn’t copy the idea of a graphical-user interface from Xerox, it significantly improved upon it in ways Xerox couldn’t. Apple’s desktop allowed users to directly touch, drag, and relocate files. With Xerox you could not. The Xerox system used a mouse that had three buttons, was cumbersome to use, couldn’t roll smoothly, and cost nearly $300. Apple developed a single-button model that could drag on just about anything and cost about $15. Apple stole it by improving it in ways that would benefit its customers.
“It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you’re doing. I mean Picasso had a saying, he said ‘good artists copy; great artists steal.’ And we (Apple) have always been shameless about stealing great ideas and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”
If the likes of Shakespeare and Jobs stole, why aren’t more teachers getting in on the action?
MASTER TEACHERS STEAL
The best teachers are master thieves. They are always on the hunt for great ideas and they nab them so they can make them their own. They are not copying someone else’s idea. Copying is pure imitation in which nothing new is added. Great teachers, like great artists, alter, reconfigure, tailor, substitute, or mashup to make something new. When they see something they like they think about how they can connect it to their students’ needs.
This is different from buying something on Teachers Pay Teachers and simply reproducing it. Only when they have truly transformed someone else’s idea, when they have made it their own and a reflection of their classroom, do these master teachers “own” that idea.
This is hard for some teachers to accept. They put enormous pressure on themselves because they believe that they should be the one with all the great ideas. They think to themselves, “I should have thought of that,” and they come to believe that stealing ideas from others is lazy and a sign of weakness.
It isn’t.
No one has the patent on great ideas. They abound. And they are out there waiting for you to seize them, make them your own,and transform your classroom.
Steal from everyone, everywhere.
You can start by doing these three things:
CONSUME GREAT CULTURE
It’s almost impossible to come up with a good idea by staring at a blank piece of paper or a computer screen. You need to put yourself in contact with great ideas. Connecting different elements stirs your imagination and is the core to the creative process. The more things you have to connect, the better your ideas become.
This means the quality and quantity of the things you consume is a crucial factor in your ability to come up with good lesson ideas.
2. LEARN FROM EVERYONE
Exposing yourself to valuable content is only half the battle. Being fascinated by other people and what they have to offer is just as important.
We all have things to learn. We are all in the process of learning, all the time. We’re at different stages with different skills, but none of us has perfected it all. If we realize this, we can then be open to what others have to offer us.
Become fascinated by others and you will put yourself in a position to learn something new. Instead of going through the motions with colleagues and friends, invite them into your classroom. Ask to sit in on theirs. Find out what’s really working with their students. Have a conversation about your frustrations that is solution oriented rather than a laundry-list of complaints.
How do you get fascinated?
Look more deeply into others. If you do, you’ll find a genuine, more compassionate side of yourself.
As the children’s television host Fred Rogers said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping’.”
Find your helpers.
3. DON’T STAY IN YOUR LANE
When you stay in your lane and only focus on your grade level or subject, your thinking is limited. A key to finding new ideas is branching out beyond strict confines and exploring the unknown. Seeing a bigger picture expands your viewpoint and can trigger a flood of new ideas.
Dive into something for a couple weeks, and then move on to something else. That’s OK. That’s how passion for a topic often works. Sometimes it will last for a long time, sometimes it’s a short intense burst. You can’t control it. Allow yourself to wander if that’s where things lead you.
Denise Trach teaches a variety of English classes at Carmel High School in Carmel, NY. Her work on mindfulness – with both students and teachers – is an inspiration to all. You can connect with her on Twitter, IG, or find out more about her on her personal blog.
1. Walk us through a great lesson from last week.
I work with three different types of students: AP Lit kids, “typical” 12th grade kids, and kids in our alternative high school who suffer with anxiety 10th-12th grade. No class, no day, no year is ever the same. Here’s something I did last week with the Aschool kids that they loved and is typical of what a Friday with them looks like.
First, I asked them to choose an abstract noun to work with (and of course, we reviewed the difference between that and a concrete noun).
Susan’s note:This post is written by Adrian Nesterwho put some thoughts on paper after the pilot reading. I have added a few ideas which are in italics and a teaching point for each path. Before launching into this, I want this sophisticated point (haha) to guide your approach to Row C in the classroom: Do not worryabout the sophistication point. Whether they get it or not is a non-issue to me. Of course I want them to do well on the exam and want to prepare them as best as I can, but I will not let myself stress out about it. Nor should you. Teach your students to write essays that explore tensions and complexities within a text, interpret a text within broader contexts, accounts for alternative interpretations, and uses a vivid and persuasive style. If we are teaching these things, our students will not only be prepared for the exam but will more importantly be prepared for future academic writing. My apologies – this was more than one point; this is pretty much like a day in my class.
(This post was originally published on APLitHelp.com in February of 2020).
When Brian posted Three Acronyms for Literary Analysis, I knew immediately that I would follow with Quick and Easy Ways into a Poem. This was by far one of the most popular posts on APLitHelp (#RIP) and with good reason. They’re quick, and they’re easy.
Many students approach poetry reluctantly feeling inadequate to make sense of verse or “find the meaning” of a poem. Sometimes this is due to past experiences with poetry where students have been led on a scavenger hunt for poetic devices but never taught the function of devices. Other times teachers have been to quick to analyze a poem without helping students embrace the struggle of working through it themselves. Or perhaps this standardized-test generation are fearful they will get the “wrong” answer with their interpretation. Whatever the reason, my goal is to give students lots of exposure to poetry with low-stakes opportunities to interact and begin to build an interpretation.
My students summarize, I want them to analyze. This is the battle I face every year.
This comes out most often when they get their essays back. They are hoping that I recognized and rewarded their brilliance. But when I conference with students about their work, and we put their essay under a microscope, they see that what’s on paper doesn’t match what they thought in the moment. That’s when they have the “a-ha!” moment. Only in hindsight did they realize that what they thought was insightful was actually superficial. Time and pressure got the better of them. In their rush to finish everything in one class period, they went with their first thought and impulse rather than taking the time to think through and think deeper into a text.
This is in no way meant to diminish my students. They are writing in a timed environment, in a competitive class, and for many of them, every grade matters. This blog post took me over two hours to write. If writing were easy Fitzgerald would have finished The Great Gatsby in two months rather than two years. This is why I love to offer students the opportunity to rewrite their essays. Writers are made better with time and revision.
But there still is that pesky dilemma of helping them in the moment.
Throughout the year I offer my students different frameworks to think about how to analyze a text. Each is a way to think clearer and articulate with greater specificity. Better thinking leads to better writing.
In doing so, I am always trying to teach them that these frameworks extend beyond the English classroom, they are what critical thinkers do all the time. Doctors that can detect a tiny heart murmur and can make the connection to a more significant heart condition can save someone’s life. The engineer that can look closely at the design of a piece of furniture and understand how the assembled parts function can repair just about anything. The school psychologist that can perceive a look of hurt in a student’s eyes can get that person the help they need. All of these examples represent people that paid attention to the details and drew significant inferences from them. That’s what I’m trying to teach my students each day in class — pay attention to the details and make significant inferences.
Here are three acronyms that I use in my classroom to teach my students to deepen their understanding and articulate better insights so that when they put pen to paper, they have a framework to move beyond the superficial.
LIT
Best used for: poetry
Literal — Before they understand a poem, my students want to spot all the similes, metaphors, and personification. That should come later. Before they begin their analysis they need to know what is literally happening in a text. This is foundational to any understanding. It grounds students and gives them confidence to move up the ladder of abstraction because it gives them the base from which to climb to higher levels of meaning.
With poetry, I ask students to find four lines or sections in the poem and tell me literally what is happening at that moment.
Inferences — This step moves students to think critically. Students have to find three moments in a poem where they can identify opportunities to make strong inferences and explain those inferences. In essence, they find places where the poem is suggesting or implying something without “literally” saying it. These are the moments when we, as readers, feel something is hinted without being said. It may be a moment where a tone shifts. It may be that an ironic moment. It could be a phrase that is not meant to me taken literally, but is used figuratively.
Thematic — Once students have found and made four literal statements about a poem and developed three different inferences about other moments in the poem, they should have enough to synthesize all this material and develop two thematic statements about the poem. This is the culminating step that alls them to see the big picture and connect the text to broader human conditions.
WHW — WHAT, HOW, WHY?
Best used for: fiction
What happens — This approach is similar in that I want my students beginning with an concrete understanding of the action or events of a text. This is important because sometimes my students want to jump to analysis before they have an understanding of what happens. This weakens their insights because they cannot tether them to anything fundamental about the text.
I’ve used this approach with snippets or whole chapters of a text. When closely reading the first page of The Catcher in the Rye, students will tell me that the narrator is a character in the story and is reflecting on is past, especially his relationship with his parents.
How does it happen — In this step, students will examine technique and the way in which an author enhances what happened. They will focus on how an author develops a text. Using the Catcher example, students will look at the first person point-of-view established on the first page, recognizing its power and limitations. They will also examine the relationship between diction and tone, noticing how words “lousy” “crap” and “occupied” reveal a character that seems cynical and disconnected.
Why is it important — Now that students understand the techniques at play, this final question asks them to consider the implication. As veteran and admired English teacher Rob Brown said on the AP Lit. Facebook group, “I feel like I’ve spent a significant portion of my adult life trying to convince students that the most important question in the universe is “So what?” followed closely by its cousin “Who cares?” This final step gets to the heart of that challenge. Using the same example, I want my student to think about why a book begins with a narrator telling his own story, looking back on his past with a jaded, cynical, and detached lens?
ICE
best used for: writing
Introduce — For my struggling writers, this acronym is their template for evidence and commentary in their body paragraphs. It gives them the means to introduce the concept that forms the basis of their analysis.
Here’s an example of a student introducing a concept from Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”: Hayden is able to develop the concept that no matter what the father did to drive out the cold, his actions will likely go unnoticed by the very person for whose benefit they are done;
Cite — Here is where they give the evidence from the text.
Even the first two words of the poem (“Sundays too”) suggests that their father not only sacrifices his own day of rest for his child, but repeats these small acts of love everyday of the week, all of it going unappreciated.Hayden highlights how “indifferently” the speaker was to their own father even though he “made banked fires blaze” creating warmth for the house and going so far as to polish their good shoes; as an adult looking back, the speaker is able to finally perceive their father’s sacrifices for them without expecting anything in return (“no one ever thanked him”) and acting solely out of love for his family; through the contrasting imagery of cold (“blueblack cold,” “cold splintering, breaking,” “indifferently,” “lonely”) and hot (“banked fires blaze,” “when the rooms were warm,” “chronic angers”)
Explain its effect — This is where insight is developed based on the evidence provided. In the example above, the effect of the evidence is seamlessly woven with the evidence. I find this far superior to the robotic, formulaic, and plodding way of writing one sentence that introduces the topic, one sentence that provides the evidence, and one sentence that explains the effect.
Eric Rovie teaches AP Literature, AP Language, and 10th Grade Gifted Language Arts at Brookwood High School in Snellville, GA. He also works for GwinnettCounty Public Schools as a Gifted Endorsement instructor, training GCPS teachers to teach gifted students. He is also a veteran AP Literature Reader, a participant in 2020’s AP Literature Pilot Reading, an AP Literature Consultant for the College Board, and an AP English consultant for the Georgia Department of Education. He coaches both varsity swim and varsity track and field for Brookwood. Previously, he was a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Webster University, Georgia State University, Agnes Scott College, Georgia Perimeter College, and Saint Leo University, and has published book chapters and articles on topics in ethics, the history of philosophy, and political theory. Eric has also worked as a staff writer for The Onion, The AV Club, PopMatters, and Chunklet.
