My Woes as a High School Educator

As a high school English teacher, my career is filled with large highs and odd lows. This past school year was filled with students who had some of the lowest motivation to succeed that I had ever experienced. So going into the new year with a plan is something I would like to do. My wife and I are having our first child in a few weeks and the school year starts shortly before then so I want to go in with the most positive perspective possible. Would you fellow Bombers be able to help?

I teach high school English and would love if you all could help me with tales of your favorite moments in English class! It could be activities you participated in, assignments that struck you as innovative, or just positive moments with a teacher that stuck with you to make you better in the end on either a personal or intellectual level.

For reference, here are some of the texts we are supposed to cover in my class:

Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Homer’s The Odyssey

The rest is a bit more obscure and adding other texts/stories is not something I can really do since other grades might cover it and would lead to me getting heat from the higher-ups. Poems are a bit more versatile though.

I’m adding the former list so you at least have some idea of what’s usually done in the classroom and might spark your own memory.

In the classroom I don’t mind getting a bit more “out there”. My class is full of wrestling, anime, and superhero memorabilia. I have a character I play inspired by The Office’s Prison Mike. We do an end of year game show where half the class is a live audience and the other half play characters discussed in class (which leads to the much awaited meeting between Greek Mythology’s Achilles and Abraham Lincoln). Every year I create a large “Illuminati Board” connecting everything we have done in class to other media in the world. My class features a Tupac vs. Shakespeare quote game. I am also the school’s host and sports announcer so I’m far from shy about getting creative to keep the attention of students.

Any help you could all provide would be wonderful! I really do appreciate any input anyone can give. My goals are to make students give literature a bit more of a chance, get them involved in extracurriculars that will advance their future goals, and make my job as engaging as possible so I can be a supportive father at home. Thank you all for your time!

Find out what the kids are into. Last year during my US culture classes at MA level in American Studies at my uni (I'm from Europe) we were divided into 6-7 groups, so called task forces, and each task force was assigned an area of research or interests they were into. So there was the music group, theatre group, film, sports, art etc. Each week, every group had to present (talk, show, whatever) some interesting thing related to their area, be it old, historical stuff or some fresh, recent news, person, song and so on. Not very long, 3-5 minutes tops, didn't even had to be power point, just talk about it (sometimes we had access to a projector, so our prof used google images to show the subject matter while the student was speaking). It didn't have to be the whole group, it could have been just 1 person from the task force. It was super fun for everyone, because we could freely talk about stuff we really like and share it with our classmates, potentially even giving them new interests. It also helped that our professor is an awesome dude.

This stuff was relevant and important to us, we were excited. Someone from the music group talked about This is America by Childish Gambino, theatre people showed some Hamilton, art group introduced Jeff Koons to us, and there's plenty more examples.

Now, obviously at uni level, all of us were pretty much fluent in English and this was a culture class, but I imagine at a high school level students can and will learn new vocabulary while researching their topics or fields of interest, especially if they're not native speakers of the language. Hope that helps you, and if not, maybe it will give you some inspiration :) Since you're teaching mostly literature, you could do something similar, ask the students to find some books, poems or song lyrics they are really into and present them in class, analyze them, say why they are important or what makes them cool in their opinion and so on.

When it comes to English class specifically, I remember one of our best professors (this was also at uni) at the beginning of the class always asked us to express an opinion about the text we were covering at the time. I used "express an opinion" because it could have been literally anything. Something positive, something negative, just something, whatever came to mind after or while reading, for example "I found it boring because there was no action" or "I really liked it because the descriptions of the landscape were detailed and beautiful" or "This poem was super weird, Poe must have really loved ravens or he was high while writing this". It took maybe 10 minutes of each 1,5h class and it was her way of getting students interested, engaging them with the text and it worked.

People said literally anything, sometimes they said the dumbest and weirdest things you could imagine, sometimes people delved deep into a text and shared some really fascinating and novel observation. Whatever the person said, it was always of value to our Professor. A student might then think "Oh, maybe I'm not that great at literary analysis, but I was finally able to express my feelings on a text and it wasn't mocked." She was one of the best teachers, I have ever had, so optimistic, so positive and always interested in whatever you thought about the text or a piece of literature, even if she didn't agree or see the same thing in the text. She was just fascinated and interested in what different texts do to a reader, what are their reactions, their observations.

My junior and senior year english teachers were my favourite through all of school (before college). Some of the most fun I remember having was just having the class be given an opaque poem and us having to (1) verbalise what we thought it was about, and (2) say how successfully it conveyed that idea or feeling.

I also remember a rad freshman year assignment where we had to "write a short skit based on one of the themes of romeo and juliet." My group created the theme 'deadly drug use' and everyone was offered extra credit for making awful costumes. It was a blast.

The easy input I can give is that all Shakespeare is 1000% context, and not knowing the why and when the piece was written completely misses the point. Case in point, Romeo and Juliet is the most popular because it's the 'romantic tragedy', but in reality that show has fucking nothing to do with romance. Romeo and Juliet was the first show Shakespeare wrote that was performed after the black plague hit London, and took 50% of the city's population with it. The intro is all about letting the audience know, hey this show is about watching these two people die. The line 'A plague on both your houses!' is the definition of a too-soon line, and would have made people literally sick. Its a show about grief, and seeing all the potential and could have done and should have done and recognizing the inevitable. Not understanding the context is like reading The Crucible and not knowing anything about McCarthy.

Stuff like this is why Shakespeare is actually extremely difficult to teach, because you literally have to dig through it line-by-line. Shakespeare shows aren't really different than stuff like Book of Mormon, dirty jokes included. Pop culture references and penis jokes abound ('Hide his bauble in a hole' is a family jewels sex joke that everyone misses).

I don't really know any great resources for researching Shakespeare references though (the side by side translation books have missed a lot, and tend to play down the dirty jokes in my experience). I usually just end up going line by line and researching all of it. Most of my passion for Shakespeare came from working with Shakespeare and Company (Link), maybe reaching out for some advice on resources would give some good advice? They have a ton of passion for education, so I wouldn't expect them to just brush you off.

I spent years as a counselor for children with diabetes (at the same camp I attended when I was a kid) and was told that I was really good at it (which probably has more to do with having an obsessive personality than any talent) so the advice I'm about to give comes from my experience with that, and I'm not trying to tell you how to do your job. All the best results I got came from giving the kids control over their situation and treating them like they were equals, in a sense. If you give them the feeling that you're investing in them and believe in them, only the kids who are never going to give you anything are going to ignore it, and those are the ones you're never going to reach anyway. Kids stick with stuff they're given positive feedback on, right? Part of my job as a counselor was teaching them to count carbs and eat according to what they're going to do later, how to cover for that, etc. and lots of the kids struggled with that (understandably, adults that get diagnosed with type 1 have a dangerously high chance of never really learning and suffering sever complications relatively quickly). My solution was always ask them what they wanted to do to learn it. ('I know you're not stupid, you just learn in a way that I'm not providing for and I need your help to get there." stuff like that). Kids want freedom, and giving them the keys to how they go about dealing with learning and letting them know you're on their side went a long way for the kids who usually never bothered to try because they learned that C's were good enough and didn't mind being treated like they were stupid. If I had a nickel for every time "Look, you aren't fooling me, we both know you're not stupid" worked, I'd have made more than my regular pay for a summer.

That being said, I was always completely burnt out after a summer, and I have absolutely no desire to do that professionally, so maybe that's just too much work for someone to do regularly. I mostly speak from a place of being almost universally praised as a counselor, and being given carte blanche to do whatever I wished with them because the management trusted me. But teaching kids to take care of their own Diabetes is a different situation than you're dealing with (mostly because they fully understood the consequences of not taking care of themselves), so I hope you can get something useful out of my rambling. Good luck duder!

This actually great advice, I was lucky enough to have teachers who followed this method, unless your genuinely interested in literature, Shakespeare is indecipherable to a young student, without a willing guide to help you understand the context. You kind have to have the teacher spell out the plot, themes, symbolism, langauge and historical context, without help you might as well be reading a sumarian tax return. The irony is this is pop culture of it's time.

Best way to understand Shakespearean play, is probably to see in preformed, but a book I thoroughly enjoyed later in life, that helped me appreciate the plays is Bill Brysons Shakespeare: The World as Stage, which might be a helpful way to frame the playwright.

The same can be said any number of books say like Animal Farm, if you don't know anything 1917 Russian Revolution, or what an allegory is, it's a weird book about shitty animals.

Passionate educator are a rare and valuable thing, Good luck!

I'm not a native english speaker, but when it comes to literature in my own language ( spanish) We always responded with interest when the curriculum skewed into the more forbidden texts. One that stuck with me to this day was about a man that was looking for "blue eyes" for his girlfriend. It was the name of the flower, but he misinterpreted and tried to get them out of a traveler that was walking alone at night. Luckily for the traveler, his eyes where green. I was 10 at the time of reading that short story.

Everything else was about dark themes like poverty, plague, ignorance, etc. Even the classics like "100 years of solitude" where fairly bleak.

The artistic merits of the texts allowed for their inclusion and it was certainly unexpected for us highschool student to have to deal with this brand of mature themes. Compared to the Odyssey or Shakespeare , magical realism was fairly new at the time and there was a lot of latinamerican pride offsetting the potential moral backlash.

I can only say this from my own perspective, but I can imagine how it could be dismaying to look at an art form as a student and feel like it's about following the instructions. I think the excitement came from feeling that there was more out there. That you could break the rules of narrative. Make your own, even.

I'm a High School History teacher who used to teach English as well. Teaching English to low ability, disinterested students is always the hardest part. It is particularly difficult if you have a poor set text that you have to somehow make it interesting. Another challenge is that, I found, a lot of the time was spent just reading the text in class because students wouldn't read it outside of class. This is particularly difficult, because if you got the students to read aloud, it was interminably boring, not because they couldn't read, but because they all read in a monotone fashion. If I read aloud for them, it was a killer on my voice, but they're also not practicing their reading skills. You also want to stop and discuss what has just happened.

An earlier post mentioned earlier the importance of contextualising the work. I (as a History teacher as well) thing that this is absolutely critical. I also really like creating analogies linking the text they are studying to their current world. What similarities can they pick up? Make the text make sense to them in practical terms.

Someone also mentioned above about getting students to express their opinions. I've been teaching for 10 years now, and the best text I've ever read about student engagement and critical thinking is Making Thinking Visible by Ron Ritchhart and the Harvard Project Zero team. If you can get a copy of that book for yourself and read through it, do! I'll put a link below to some Visible Thinking Routine strategies. These are great at drawing out answers from all students, but also at helping to filter out initial 'dumb' answers or joke answers from students. Most of the time students give a 'dumb' answer is because they aren't actually thinking through their answer, they're just asked their opinion and put on the spot. You of course get the occasional class clown, but regular use of Thinking Routines often filters that out. The important thing about Visible Thinking Strategies is to make it part of your everyday teaching practice, not just a one off for a special lesson.

http://www.visiblethinkingpz.org/VisibleThinking_html_files/03_ThinkingRoutines/03b_Introduction.html

Both my parents are educators, my sister is an educator, and a lot of my relatives are educators so I would like to first say thank you for doing possibly the most important job in society. Secondly, you never know when a student's passion will get lit. I remember not being interested in some topics back in high school only to find interest or respect for them as an adult and often times I can attribute at least some of it to an educator.

When I was a senior my American English teacher had us read some of MLK's lesser known writings. Reading how radical he was was both insightful and eye opening.

A world lit class I took was also pretty good. When we covered greek mythology the prof would go in depth not on the plot but on secondary things that were insightful. Such as discussing the tragedy of Dido from The Aeneid and relaying it to us in ways we could more easily empathize with. One specific example was how one sided their relationship was and everyone in the world can relate to that since at one time or another we've all been in that situation.

In English 1010 my class did an assignment where we picked any song of our choice and wrote an essay on what we thought the song meant. It was simple and easy but doing it as our first assignment of the semester was a very effective way of engaging us and loosening up the tension of sharing personal things with a room full of strangers. Btw, the song I chose was Stinkfist.

In junior high our English class did a two minute long speech that was used as an introduction to public speaking. What was fun about it was it didn't matter what the speech was about so we could use our imagination and talk about whatever as long as it lasted two minutes. I ended up being a Krusty the Clown car dealer doing a crappy tv/radio advertisement.

I can't remember which English class this was but it was in high school and we did an assignment where we were spilt up and went to the different grade schools in town and each read a story to a class. It was pretty fun, the kids thought it was cool that older kids were hanging out and reading to them, and it challenged us to talk and perform in front of a group.

My only advice is to not show a modern retelling of Shakespeare in your classroom. I had to suffer through 2 classes worth of bad adaptations after reading Twelfth Night. I tried to ignore the movie and do my math homework instead, but the teacher caught me and took it away from me. It lead to a very awkward conversation with my math teacher, who eventually agreed with me that "She's the Man" is a terrible film, and gave me an extension on my assignment.

Also, as a student I always disliked that highschool classes seemed to focus on immediate, facile answers to potentially interesting questions rather than have students ruminate on questions and put together a thoughtful and measured response. But this is more of a critique of the education system as a whole, and "Don't show bad movies like She's the Man" seems to be more within your power as an English teacher.

We had spent a few weeks I think in 11 or 12 English class on rhetoric. Activities were basic definitions of rhetorical devices to be remembered, as well as excerpts to be analyzed for which particular devices were being used and where. Discussions were about how these rhetorical devices could be effective, including how they could be used to distract or mislead.

It's one of the only curricular things I remember learning in high school that I found eminently useful in life. Cutting through the chaff and isolating someone's position, and noting where/how they may be trying to manipulate you.

Literature-wise, the only thing I remember ever genuinely enjoying was Much Ado About Nothing. Its content and writing was the first time I'd ever connected to--and felt I had a grasp on (as far as literally being able to follow along reading the blasted thing)--anything Shakespeare, and the levity made going through it as a class something I privately looked forward to.

One time my teacher held me back after class and had an unpatronizing conversation about what I was interested in and what I wanted to pursue with regards to academia. It was only once, but it was memorable, affecting, and the concern inspiring (I was a slacker student). I didn't become some ace student from it, but still, it helped. After all, I fondly remember it to this day.

Besides all that, I remember very little else about English class (aside from non-curricular stuff). Good luck, have a great year, and congrats on the baby!

I think you might have to try and read the overall mood of the class and guesstimate WHY they are disinterested. It can vary quite wildly. Disinterest could be that it's too hard, too easy, too abstract, not abstract enough, not enough context, too much information at once.... You know they will all learn differently. But if you see a trend of disinterest in the class there's a good chance that the root issue is something they share, which would make it easier to work around.

That is, as long as it's not entirely out of your hands and they have already set their minds to not caring before even trying. It happens. They have lives outside the classroom that'll be brought in.

As for anecdotes. I'm not a native english speaker, but I started reading full novels in english when I was 10 or so. I basically had a solid head start in that department. The last english teacher I had was great. Since she realised that I had a legitimate interest in reading and knew that the actual curriculum would be too easy, she instead recommended and lent me books from her own collection. Originally living in the UK, she had a ton of books in english that felt way more organic and things she were interested in instead of just whatever the powers above said we should read. She was the best! It really kept me motivated and interested in actually working. As a result english is one of the classes I absolutely nailed.

As someone who always scraped by with minimal effort out of pure apathy, having the one or two teachers that actively challenged me and pushed me to put in effort were real lifesavers. It's so easy to let the kids that don't cause trouble and aren't actively failing sort themselves out. But not being challenged and not learning how to work for your results are real issues as well...

There's a lot to unpack there. May I ask what grade level you are teaching? Just speaking from experience, what I would have responded to would have varied greatly depending on how old I was. When I was a freshman, I definitely would have wanted the "cool" teacher. But by the time I was a senior, I had more appreciation for the teachers who cut the crap and told me what I needed to know, even if that was "Look, you will probably never need to actually apply this in real life, but it's on the A.C.T. and impresses college admissions officers, so listen up."

Particularly for older students, I think it's best to remember that they are almost adults, so treating them like it is going to be your best bet. I remember I had a social studies teacher who gave me a B on a paper. I complained bitterly because my paper was inarguably, objectively better than a lot of other people who got A's. The teacher's response was, paraphrased: "Yeah, yours is better, but I'm not grading you on the same scale. The kids who got A's put everything they had into those papers, but your advanced enough I can tell you only spent about 80% of your maximum effort on putting this together, so I gave you a grade for 80% of your effort." It was raw as fuck, but she was absolutely right and it made me re-evaluate how I was approaching class. It ended up giving me a lot more respect for her than if she had changed my grade or just blown me off.

As far as that specific curriculum, I notice that a lot of that material is connected to some pretty cool historical periods, so diving into the context surrounding them might help engage the students. The Gettysburg Address is a great speech, but it loses a lot of its force when divorced from its context and there's a ton of little details that are cool to discuss. For example, it was given four months after the battle because it took them almost that long just to bury all the people who died fighting it. You also have the issue of whether the Gettysburg Address we know was actually the Gettysburg Address that was given. There are at least 5 different versions that were written in Lincoln's handwriting, and each differs in some minor details as well as newspaper accounts of the speech. It might be fun to have the students debate which version they like the most.

@therealturk: I teach Freshman and thank you for the awesome input. That detail about the delay after the battle of Gettysburg is also fantastic information!

Bombers, please feel free to keep updating with your memorable moments. I plan on responding to everyone once I can sit down at a computer.