A few years back, I was reading a short short story with my English 11s that relied heavily on inference. We got to the end of the story and there should have been a reaction. 🦗 🦗 🦗. Nothing. Not a single reaction and I realized that they didn’t get
I had been teaching high school English for 4 years when 9/11 happened. So now, it is 20+ years later, and I am teaching high school students who were born years after the tragic events of that day. I remember working through 9/11 lesson plans with one of my mentor
One of my favorite teaching techniques for high school English has to be using short short stories. Sometimes these are called Flash Fiction. Other times they are called Micro Fiction. No matter what you call them, a short short story is one that you can read in under 10 minutes
Engagement is always the goal in high school English classes. We want our students to participate fully in reading and writing in our classes. This is really important when when we thinking about literature discussion. These discussion tend to be reflective of how successfully students have read and help lead
Do you want a short story unit packed full of activities to study characterization, structure, tone, writing literary analysis and more? Short Stories about Coming of Age with a focus on the loss of innocence is a great way to engage your high school English students in all of this
I recently saw a comedian on Instagram talking about the difference between a nerd, a geek and a dweeb. He used a Venn diagram to show the similarities and differences. And it turns out I am full on in the nerd category. It’s true: one of the things that brings
My students were struggling with have deep discussion in their spring book clubs. The problem may just be that they’re seniors and they are “sooooo over school.” But I felt like there was more to it. So I introduced them to a Literary Analysis Discussion Deck. These discussion questions for
By the time students get to their junior and senior years of high school English, they often feel like they have been there, done that. Because of Common Core, we have New Criticism-ed them to death. So teaching them how to use other styles of literary theory is a must
Sometimes in our high school classes we need to help students to access difficult texts, difficult skills or difficult concepts. This is where paired texts come into play. There are so many reasons to use text pairings in high school English. They can help to fill out units that
Looking to expand both engagement and rigor in your high school English classroom, consider using Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics” along with three different types of literary criticism to encourage them to read deeply and explore different lines of thinking while applying it to the same text. Why Teach Raymond Carver’s
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