Definitely planning to write about it after I do it!
Public HS English Teacher in NYC.
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Definitely planning to write about it after I do it!
Yes! Sad I’ll be missing your panel too—hopefully someday soon. Not planning to leave this business anytime soon/ever.
It’s definitely one of the best books “about” reading and what it can do that I’ve ever read
Sad I’m missing this/hope this means more people teach “James”; planning to teach it/Huck has been one of the most productive professional experiences I’ve had recently. Clarifies all sorts of things: the stakes of close reading, the meaning of “canon,” the place of “craft” in academic settings
The sonnets are sliced
Had to add a third, least-well spoken level to this haunting ad, “well-read person,” which is the level you get to when you’ve actually done the reading and are incapable of speaking well anymore because you’ve read so much about something that the complexity of it stuns/incapcitates you.
Do I think it’s perfect? No! Will I spend the rest of my professional life working on it, and will I send my daughter through it, because I think it’s a magical thing worth giving myself over to? Yes!
Say whatever you want about public schools and your little attempts to replace them—doesn’t undermine the outrageous fact that my colleagues and I have built a system that will enable 1 million kids to rocket through our country’s biggest city on Thursday to get publicly funded care and education.
Do think following up with James, an expert close read, will help drive this point home
I’m looking forward to trying to get at this fact with my kids. It’ll hopefully help complicate their understanding of close reading as primarily mining for meaning, rather than laying out an argument where something more interesting is at stake.
Have been reading some good close readings of this book, and probably no other book I’ve taught makes it so obvious that a good close read is essentially autobiographical—an account of a reader wrestling with a book, not simply distilling its meaning.
Same goes for the Toni Morrison line “The cyclical attempts to remove the novel from classrooms extend Jim’s captivity on into each generation of readers”
Thanks for writing that, Lionel. Will use.
“Nobody who reads thoughtfully the dialectic of Huck’s moral crisis will be wholly able to accept without some question and some irony the assumptions of the respectable morality by which he lives,” a Lionel Trilling line, is one of those critic lines that feels basically written for my HS class.
(Edward Hirsch)
“How can I be filled with such a vast love?”
He’s the best. I try to keep him in mind when I get into weird over-doing-it mode
Or, if you don’t have a question but someone said something wild: “I just overheard ____ say _____. I need everyone to think about that for a second. Let’s write—open up your journals.”
Am especially a fan of the 8m of writing mid class. Things a little quiet? A little off? Ask an interesting question and have them write for 8m, which is longer than everyone thinks. Some interesting stuff will come up.
If you’re doing fun journaling stuff, you’re a Peter Elbow disciple
Elbow’s argument that writing was intrinsically a part of the learning process, not something that you ask kids to share with you to show they’ve learned, is one obvious shield against GPT-ification—and of course a clear argument against its use.
This and basically everything else Peter Elbow wrote about feels especially relevant/useful this year. “Writing for Learning-- Not Just for Demonstrating Learning” peterelbow.com/pdfs/Writing...
August is Women in Translation Month! To celebrate we asked critics, scholars, and translators: what are some of your favorite works written and/or translated by women? Here are some of their recommendations. We hope you would check out a few of these and celebrate women in translation!
Have a great start to your year! Fall is always the best part
About 60% of my students are bilingual, so every year I hear stories from them about their early education, sitting confusedly/politely through ESL services and classes
“Omg they’re all the same length!” It’s funny/very rewarding being the first person to introduce brains to the concept of a sonnet
Gonna slice up 8 sonnets line-by-line and give them to 8 groups in little plastic bags, have the kids construct them, reveal the real sonnets afterwards, then I’ll have them look a lil closer and they’ll all discover that they’re working with one kind of form—because I teach kids/this will be fun.
I especially love that this is so unpolished. Kid didn’t even have to think about it.
Ah that’s annoying and of course not uncommon—sorry to hear it
No but wish it were! Still going to be fun. Taking the kids to see Oedipus on stage in the city, which should be kind of crazy
Not for everyone, but it is definitely for me
Is a little crazy that my job is to read these plays and figure out what I might want to do with high schoolers to make them excited about them
Is a little crazy that my job is to read these plays and figure out what I might want to do with high schoolers to make them excited about them
What if I start this year’s 12th grade class with this insane Kafka parable
Loving this but yet another weird cover to carry w me on the train
Ah I hadn’t even considered fiction. Great ideas.
🌞🌚
His google search moments before: books
Very cool. Thank you!
Rivers: they do a lot! What are they!
Specific ask: anyone know anything interesting to read, historical or otherwise, about the East River or the Hudson River? Going to take my kids to at least one while we’re reading Huck, and I’d like to teach them interesting things about them…
Hahah please report back if you find it
Hahahah amazing
12 years in and finally teaching this for the first time 🟢
(Also John Greenleaf Whittier and some Whitman)
Taking the teens this fall to the Berg collection to see his journals and his pressed plants. NYPL: nice place
As the sticker on my printer says, “welcome to the cunyverse”
Maybe just sit here and read until the kids come
Under-appreciated challenge of getting organized here is resisting just reading whatever seems interesting
Yeah this is a bipartisan thing for sure
😳
Like ah yes student writing does not need to be a weird waste of time
Email from one of my student newspaper editors is a great reminder that writing pedagogy is most effective when kids have a sense of audience—something @biblioracle.bsky.social reminded me of/is definitely right about.
He’s so fun and so are lots of other mid-late 20th c American surrealists
I can’t remember why I thought I was too cool for Charles Simic but I’m glad that era of my taste is over
And like—this isn’t about the language of the standards. It’s about what gets built around them and has real consequences for teachers and kids. If they were just neutral organizing principles for reading and writing instruction, I’d say they’re basically banal.
Yeah—definitely an experience I’m familiar with. It’s not like it’s impossible to undo some of this stuff, just takes pointing out where a few mistakes were made.
Left a weird vacuum where a discipline used to be
They ended the concept of English as a literature class, especially for poor/struggling students, in the name of skills building. This is why, for example, they’re much more clearheaded about “text complexity” than text quality—it’s basically a totally non-literary undertaking.
Look I know it’s boring, and I wish it were more interesting than this, but kids don’t read books in high school because of standardized tests and a handful of instructional shifts people didn’t think through about 15 years ago.
Two fun facts: already decided I’m using this particular close reading next time I teach Beloved, because it’s really interesting; this book caused tension in my home, since I used to work in publishing and wanted to read it but we had only one copy, and my wife who works in publishing hogged it
Obviously subject to change but am excited about this framing for my curriculum this year—reading and thinking about classics and their adaptation. My attempt to convince them close reading can do more than produce timed essays
“Of course, when Celina came in the furniture and I behaved as if nothing had happened.”
Important life lesson, I think
Going into this school year thinking about how to avoid letting the English teacher-y push for a specific mode of interpretation crowd out the necessity of teaching students how to cultivate judgment and taste—lit class as also a kind of art appreciation class
Union organizer becomes a teacher becomes a grad student—refreshing to read these kinds of trajectories. People like that will leave a lasting impact on any kid they teach.
Loved reading this—Marc is an active unionist in retirement. A great case of the sort of person who just keeps learning. www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025...
And for free! Very cool. You should try it.
Whenever my kids read his reaction to the final sentence they’re inevitably like 🫢
Hate to say it but that bookshop on Smith street a few blocks south of Atlantic is basically right about the ontological status of books
Inevitably of course one kid who’s like Can I get a less gross copy
People who think the teens won’t read should try handing out a book on the first day of a unit of instruction. Flipping it over, thumbing pages, wondering what this teacher guy’s getting them into, little murmurs of excitement
Eventually will get to one of last year’s favorites, the man my kids called T Paine
Think I’m going to start with a little paired reading of Columbus and las Casas. Potential American lit theme this year: telling the truth is good.
Interesting! Very curious how my students would react to that kind of conversion narrative. Think they’d find it pretty disturbing—could be really interesting.
People who teach HS American Lit surveys (if there are any of us still out there): what do you teach first?
Me, concluding an arduous Shakespeare unit w the kids
At what point in the sequence do they get to this? Ideological stuff aside, the history teachers I know are bound to such giant surveys that these seem like ludicrously detailed standards about contemporary events.
He looks great!
Good timing—was trying to figure out my teacher fashion for the fall
“Inside-outing” is such a great way to describe it—thank you!
Hah, Oedipus is after that—and then we’ll go see a modernized staging of it in NYC. Have a bit more of a capacious understanding of it, I guess.
Feel like a lot of them will anticipate the need for a lot of what Everett does without knowing anything about his book
Teaching Huck Finn and James back-to-back to start this year, thinking of it as a single unit of study about classics and their role in contemporary life, and I’m having a hard time deciding at what point/how I’ll explain what James will eventually do to this book.
Taught intro to @annieabrams.bsky.social SHORTCHANGED to 1st-year college writers, fresh from prior educational experiences, and wow it really resonated! Ideas about empty form, rubrics, robotic writing take on new meaning now with AI! @hopkinspress.bsky.social www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...
Want them to be like me and have a very specific journal they like best. They live in nyc so can develop very specific paper tastes if they choose
Much more journaling for my kids this year—nice dose of anti-AI writing. Taking them to the NYPL’s Berg Collection, where I saw journals this summer from Thoreau, Woolf, Nabokov. Going to start this year in all my classes reading excerpts from great ones to get them pumped about private thinking.
Friendly note to my hs teachers out there that it’s actually a great outcome if kids end a unit of instruction with nothing much more than a deep appreciation for some great author and their work—doesn’t necessarily need to end in transferable skills
They convinced a lot of hs English teachers, for example, that it’s wrongheaded to organize English classes around literature
What’s so interesting to me about this thread is that it shows that the effort to undue reform’s worst ideas really is k-16. Identical issues from the top down. Why I and a few others are obsessed with the idea that the “humanities crisis” begins long before college.
Hah that’s actually a pretty useful framing! We’ll be hitting some Shakespeare rom com this year too, haven’t decided which
Yeah honestly he’s a smart kid
Told one kid about it, gave him a plot summary, and he looked at me like I was a psycho
Am extremely curious about lots of things but especially two right now: how my kids are going to react to Oedipus; how the version we’re going to see speaks, in the words of the people producing it, to our current political moment
Right here w you guys (marathon training, 2 yo at home 🙃)
Hahah oh man
Is “lady chatterly’s lover” based on the 2001 hit movie Shrek?
Fair! But I do think I’d love some postmodern stuff out loud. Charles Bernstein would probably be really fun
To be clear I love her work but this isn’t something to sit and listen to, drowsy after a glass or two of wine www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43255/...
Me at most readings: wait can you read that like 4-10 more times please