Today was pack-up day. It was also my first time in John Champe since that Friday in mid-March when I briefly returned to rescue the class fish. He’s doing fine, FYI.  

The school was darkly lit, the hallways and bulletin boards still showing announcements and ads that were hanging there on March 12. My own letter board still had the announcement of which two classes won the PEER advisory lesson contest. 

My classroom calendar was a week behind. For the sake of optics I wish it had been showing the correct date. I’m not sure why I was behind a week.   

The soggy soccer ball abided in the northeastern corner. 

But there were a few signs that two months had passed. In the courtyard outside my classroom was a new concrete patio. I did a double take when I saw it, counting the squares, then pumped my fist. It’s no ordinary patio: it can double as a giant chess board. 

That was the high point of the day. 

This is the tenth time in my career I’ve packed up a classroom for the summer. It’s usually a pleasant experience. Today, though, every moment packing up the room — taking down student artwork, stacking chairs, saying hi to masked coworkers as they passed in the hallway, stuffing four hundred and seventy five origami cranes in a locker — was a reminder of the circumstances that brought us here and the uncertainty that follows. 

But that’s life. From my experience, it isn’t characterized by a great amount of certainty. The stability that school provides students, and the happiness and fulfillment students provide the staff members who work with them during the year, has become all the more apparent during our time working online. Being back at Champe just reinforced a simple truth I imagine is shared by many: I miss it, and I can’t wait to come back. 

 

I’ve never been great at expressing — or receiving — sincere gratitude. 

I’ve had my moments, though. I remember leading the teacher-appreciation-week-charge during my senior year of high school. I was president of my school’s National Honors Society (to the lasting disgust of the poindexter who ran against me), and in that capacity I had all the members choose a teacher for whom they would purchase a gift and write a note. I provided expensive chocolates and a thoughtfully written card to my teacher, a veteran member of the math department who also happened to be my current pre-calculus teacher, which I think may have affected my choosing her. She was pleased, and I was happy she was pleased. I took the responsibility seriously. When I found out my friend had forgotten to buy her teacher a gift, I scolded her so harshly we got into what turned into a very emotional spat right there at the lockers, ending with her turning her back to me and storming away. The next day I brought her a package of the same expensive chocolates as a mea culpa (it worked). 

But overall, as a student I felt that appreciation for teachers was tough to adequately express without it seeming perfunctory or calculated. After all, I reasoned, it was tough to know just how impactful a teacher really was without the benefit of hindsight. 

I’ve lightened up a little bit since then. When I was hired at Champe in 2017, I was asked to attend a week-long professional development in Sterling during the last week of July. It was led by a pair of retired educators who toured the country preaching their gospel of structured classroom management strategies. It was old-fashioned, unflashy, and founded on a few core beliefs, the first of which being that every student wants to look good in front of his/her peers. The main speaker, John, was decidedly not unflashy. He had plenty of flash to burn. He was a born storyteller, a man who loved the stage and an audience of educators, even if most of them were reluctant to be giving up an entire week to be with him. He mentioned his love of horseback riding and ranching, which clashed with his salesman’s mustache and cheap suits (he looked like he’d be more at home selling you a used car than saddling up on a horse). In any event, their instructional philosophy was exactly what I needed to hear at that point in my career. I took pages of notes during the week-long session, vowing to implement as many of these strategies as possible in my own classroom. As a token of my thanks, on the day of our final class I gave John a gift: a copy of Thomas McGuane’s essay collection Some Horses. He was grateful.      

During the school year I try to make time for a short unit on the rhetoric of sincere appreciation. This usually happens around Christmas. I have an activity that I started at the alternative school, a letter to a good person. I pitch it to the students as a money-saving activity: a well written letter of gratitude is more valuable and impactful than any purchased gift. Students often write it to a parent as a Christmas gift. This year I bought a wax stamp to make it look extra classy. Invariably students return from Christmas break with stories of tears and hugs after the letter was read. 

With my AP students this year, I tinkered with the directions slightly, making them focus on specific reasons why they are grateful for that person, while also making them conceal any indication that this was an assignment for class, further heightening the intended emotional effect on the recipient. The floor was for the letter to be at the very least heart-warming

I don’t claim the assignment to be particularly original, but I’d like to think my rant about the cheapness of hollow words with which I bookend the assignment is. No one, I mutter to my students, gripping the lectern for dramatic emphasis, wants to read a note containing a few trite phrases. Maybe in the future I should qualify that I don’t want that, as an English teacher who is tasked with pushing students to express original ideas. It takes work to express sincere gratitude. 

This week, during a time in which the world is dealing with more immediate concerns, it seemed extra superfluous to receive kind words from parents, students, and administrators. If there’s been a consistent sentiment I’ve noticed from fellow teachers, it’s been a frustration that there’s not more they can do. Last night an administrator sent me an email, describing specific reasons why I was a valued member of the staff (a challenging prompt if there ever was one). I was deeply moved, and then briefly tempted to show it to my Lang students as an example of writing that contains specific evidence with a line of reasoning that proves a thesis.   

It made me continue reminiscing on my own attempts at expressing appreciation, the successes — and a notable failure. 

I remember writing a note to a former elementary teacher, updating her on my life after graduating college and moving up to Winchester, thanking her for her support and instruction during my formative years. She was retired and no longer able to live alone. I was very pleased with myself for being so thoughtful. 

She never responded. A few months later I saw her at a family event. I was tasked with driving her back to her assisted living facility. During the drive, I asked if she had received my note. 

“I did,” she said stiffly. “Thomas, if your mother was still alive and saw your handwriting, she would be absolutely ashamed of you.” 

Harsh but fair, I thought. After further consideration, though, I decided her words were harsh but harsh. I dropped the old battle-axe off at her nursing home and never contacted her again. 

That said, even in that brief encounter she was still teaching me life lessons (good educators never stop!!!!). The other day, when I sat down to write a note to a high school English teacher who meant a lot to me, I made the crucial decision to type it. 

Elizabethan music is terrible and dated. It should not be associated with Shakespeare’s plays. 

A few nights ago I tried to watch a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Before the play started, period-dressed musicians performed a jaunty English folks song with recorders and harpsichords. They were talented and well rehearsed. The overall atmosphere they conjured, though, was the soundtrack to getting your glasses snapped in half by a bully. Completely out of the mood, I turned off the TV before Falstaff even wandered on-stage. Who enjoys this archaic noise? Classical music is what NPR plays as filler when they can’t afford a more expensive show. Yes, recorders and harpsichords are period-appropriate, but that doesn’t mean they should share any part of the stage with Shakespeare’s dramatic inventions, unless we’re going to make everything about the production accurate to the less socially refined times in which Shakespeare lived (all-male actors, only rich people got to sit down to watch the play, scant personal hygiene). Elizabethan music coats Shakespeare’s transcendent works in a thick layer of dust. If you have to have music associated with your production of a Shakespeare play, why not find emotionally appropriate songs that will connect with the audience?

With this agreed upon, I humbly request a new tradition for April 23, in which all lutes, recorders, harpsichords, and Elizabethan scores are summarily piled high and torched. 

Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1997) is overrated.        

It is indeed “opulent” and “epic”, but when The Norton Anthology recommended this full-text, 241-minute production of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, they seem to have minimized the value of what I consider a very important component of a film or play: the actors. Branagh (the name is Celtic for “ham”) mugs for the camera at every opportunity. His choices behind the camera aren’t any more subtle. The film is packed with quick cuts and lurid visual effects, which haven’t aged too well over the past two decades. I can appreciate the spectacle and the excess, but even when I watched it in high school I remember thinking — it was around the time the earth literally started splitting apart when the ghost of Hamlet’s father appeared before him — this is a little much. Why is this production held as the touchstone of Hamlet films? Is it because he cuts nothing from this play, a play that has always, even since its very first production, been cut for time? Is it because the quantity of A-list actors, many of whom (Jack Lemon, Robin Williams) turn in performances that are only acceptable if compared to a high school production. 

Watch the 2010 David Tennant/Patrick Stewart version instead. Or the Laurence Olivier classic, which I avoided for too long because I heard it was dreamy and dated, but still holds up quite well. Or the Russian Gamlet.       

Or watch the Branagh version, if it’s the one that suits your (lack of) discerning taste. Don’t tell me it’s the best, though. 

Hamlet should not be taught to high schoolers

Or, if it is taught, it should be the final play in a sequence that allows students to appreciate what makes it so weird and widely-studied five hundred years later. Everything that makes the play great — psychologically complex soliloquies that show a character forming their ideas in real time, the inscrutable machinations of the title character, the horrific spectacle of the conclusion — stands in contrast to Shakespeare’s preceding masterpieces, like Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, both parts of Henry IV, and Henry V. In these plays, characters speak to the audience, but they are always confiding — we don’t get to witness the poetry of their deliberation (one of the reasons “To be or not to be” was such a watershed moment in literature). In these plays, the behavior of the characters was sometimes surprising, but it always made dramatic sense. There are, conservatively, half a dozen plot holes in Hamlet. Some of them might be the result of revision and folio printing errors, but some of them are deliberately and bizarrely left unanswered by Shakespeare. Is Hamlet acting insane, or does he really lose his mind? This cryptic equivocation can’t be appreciated by a reader who hasn’t experienced more conventional works where all the important questions are answered. High schoolers hate plot holes. And I don’t blame them for their frustration at why Hamlet suddenly ages a decade midway through the play, or why Hamlet is just finding out about Ophilia’s death at her graveside. I have no answers for them. In my opinion, these plot holes are best analyzed when held against Shakespeare’s more conventional and more tightly wound works. 

And then there’s the ending, in which all the principal characters are left dead except for Horatio. Many of Shakespeare’s preceding works were filled with violence (Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus x 100), but none had ever concluded with such nihilism, which Shakespeare would top later in his career with King Lear (imagine teaching that to high schoolers). Every time I have tried to teach Hamlet, students have always been bemused by the ultraviolence of the ending. There’s always a spoken or unspoken sentiment: we spent four weeks building up to this? I worry that for that for many students, that’s their lasting impression of a Shakespearean tragedy: everyone is dead at the end, to no one’s satisfaction.        

Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Macbeth: all tragedies that allow a high schooler to marvel at Shakespeare’s genius without experiencing the frustrations that occur when reading Hamlet out of context.   

Falstaff deserves more time with high schoolers 

Sir John is Shakespeare’s greatest comic character, and yet from my observation he is almost never used in high school curriculum. I wonder if it’s because the plays he appears in are depict English history, which at first blush seems too daunting to most teachers. I’m not sure what the reason is, but I do know that if a comedy is taught in high school, it is usually A Midsummer Night’s Dream — which is a fine play but not that funny to high schoolers — or The Taming of the Shrew — which is funny to high schoolers, for all the wrong reasons. 

Falstaff, on the other hand, is a walking (waddling) figure of appetites, of desire run to excess. He’s the fat Socratic devil on Hal’s shoulder in the Henry IV plays, always ready for more drink, love, and scamming. In my small sample of experience teaching 1 Henry IV, students were intrigued by him while identifying with Hal’s coming-of-age conflict.    

So teach the Henry IV plays. Kids will like them. Or teach The Merry Wives of Windsor, which I finally read this spring and was surprised at how much it rose above its reputation as Shakespeare’s worst comedy. It’s probably his least intellectual comedy, but I’d go so far to say that it’s probably one of his funniest. If nothing else, it would make a great play to teach in a classroom, where the screwball scenes can be acted out and the outrageous accents can be appreciated.  

Thank you for reading and agreeing with my opinions. I hope you take some time today to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday/deathday. If you need recommendations…

• Watch some of Paul Cantor’s lectures on the politics of Shakespeare
• Read one of James Shapiro’s great books about two seminal years in Shakespeare’s life: 1599 and 1606
• Watch an online production of one of Shakespeare’s work performed by the great American Shakespeare Center down in Staunton. 
• Read Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt, a great work of historical speculation that helps set his works into better context

 

This month PEER created an advisory lesson promoting healthy activities to help de-stress. It was a timely lesson. 

I had an idea to supplement the lesson with an art component, some sort of decoration for the long stretch of while wall outside my classroom. A few weeks ago I brought to school a two-foot by six-foot piece of plywood that was taking up space in my garage. “Here’s your canvas,” I told the students. “What should be painted on it?”

 

I further qualified the instructions — the art had to relate to the healthy activities theme of our lesson, and it should be some sort of slogan, a brief quote, ideally positive in the tone. Other than that, they were given carte blanche!   

After a few minutes considering ideas, Anisha murmured a phrase just loud enough for the people sitting next to her to hear. She wasn’t confident that it was a good idea, but with some encouragement, she shared it with the whole group. “Just keep swimming,” she said.    

The students were enthusiastic. This was the one. I liked it just fine, but I didn’t understand why these three words connected with them so much. Then they explained that it was from Finding Nemo, which has been on my to-watch list since middle school.   

Painting the mural took two weeks. After Grace painted the lettering Kerti had sketched, the real activity became adding the aquatic life. For this I knew I could rely on the army of talented artists in my current and past classes. 

Roomana, a former AP Lang student, specialized in fish last year as part of her AP portfolio. She spent several study halls working in my classroom, first painting a giant, wide-mouthed trout, then adding bubbles all over the mural, the type of small touch that looks so classy and simple until you try to do it yourself.   

Day by day the mural started to come together, resembling a high-end resort’s aquarium: a lobster (painted by Liv), two jellyfish (Nana), multicolored sea snails (Cam), an octopus (Aaiswarya), a clown fish (Megan). 

Some students volunteered to add decorations, while some were pressed into service. Sami, for example, was not terribly interested in adding her touches to the mural, but with some encouragement she became as invested as anyone, deciding to paint plankton, a character who is allegedly a character from the TV show Spongebob Squarepants. Her intent was to make it an Easter egg for those looking at the mural closely. She spent an hour during two lunch blocks carefully applying the details of the little creature. 

To hang it on the wall, I used 200-pound-graded French cleats, the cinder block drilling completed by our head of maintenance, Chris Hill. 

Today we hung the mural and festooned it with links of healthy activities, student submissions to our advisory activity last Friday. As we reach the final stretch of the school year I’d like to paint over it and create a new mural, perhaps based around the themes of our quarter four advisory lesson. Hopefully the mural will continue to make use of not just my PEER students, but all of the talented artists at John Champe. 

This year Alyson Mullee and I started what I hope will be a new tradition for ever speech and forensics meet: commemorative student-crafted buttons. Forensics requires constant practice; the tournaments are always on Saturdays, often a long ways from home. A keepsake helps boost morale, and in a way helps legitimize the effort. My talented students have done an amazing job designing them over the course of the school year…

This button, designed by seniors Andrew Reeder and Millie Morris, commemorated our first meet of the forensics season at Woodrow Wilson High School in D.C. At the last minute the meet was moved across campus to Alice Deal Middle School, but the button order had already been placed with StickerMule, which I was using at the time for production. The change in location didn’t matter to me — I had no intention of abandoning this adorable shrivel-faced caricature of our 28th President. 

We brought fifty of these buttons to the event. Every Champe student got four — one for themselves, and three to give out to friends at the event. Andrew and Millie placed second at the meet. As most of us boarded the bus to go home that evening, Andrew hopped in a car with his grandpa to head across town to attend Game Four of the World Series (he brought me back a rally towel, which I now have in my classroom). 

      

These two were designed by Megan, a first-year forensics student in the current-event heavy category of extemporaneous speech. Without much prior public speaking experience, she quickly began methodically and meaningfully working toward improving her skills, practicing her movements, her pacing, inflection, and intonation. She also committed herself to becoming familiar with as much of the world news as possible.  “I know too much about African rice prices” she muttered one afternoon as she prepared another rehearsal speech. Her skill at extemp has grown measurably over the past six months, and it is a great complement to her artistic and graphic design prowess.

The Stone Bridge buttons were made possible courtesy of my former coworker and current Willard librarian Michelle Yalavarthi, who let me use her button press the Friday before the event and showed me in how to format an image for production on Google Docs.   

We volunteered, relatively at the last minute, to host WACFL IV. The button, designed by Megan, mixes our knight mascot with a few common forensics tropes — students dressed in job-interview-black, and extemp and impromptu kids armed with notecards and pencils for their speeches.

Another button made possible through the generosity of Michelle at Willard, I gave as many of the limited buttons to any Champe student who participated or volunteered at the event. From a fundraising standpoint, my fellow coaches and I learned a lot from the experience (we over-ordered pizzas and under-ordered profit-heavy Cup-O-Noodles). Also memorable was the bleak spectacle of the judges’ lounge. Over a hundred adults — some paid, some volunteering their time, all very unhappy to have made this the focus of their Saturday — spent seemingly every moment they weren’t scoring rounds eating anything we put in front of them. Oh, and complaining. They did a lot of that too. In the morning when the large coffee percolator only was producing hot water, the judges’ room buzzed with anger and injustice, heads shaking, oaths muttered, as if we were about to witness the world’s most pathetic prison riot. At lunch time the judges consumed two dozen pizzas, six sandwich platters from Subway, close to two hundred Indian mimosas, and several containers of brownie bites from Costco. A lot of it was food we didn’t sell to the students at our listed price and didn’t want to waste. The unhappy adults ate anything we brought into the room, a stirring testament to how we often use gluttony to blunt our self loathing.     

Both of these were designed by Megan, and they both make use of the Massaponax High School panther mascot. The Pink Panther button was the first forensics button to be pressed with my own 2 inch button press, made possible by the John Champe PTSA. Also made possible by Elnaz, my wonderful teacher’s assistant who devoted an entire fourth block (and all of her arm strength) to pressing dozens of them as I taught class. 

It was fun giving out the buttons to the kids on my team and students at other schools. Seeing students proudly wearing them as the day progressed reinforced the community nature of forensics, which at its best can be an affirming, enriching experience where students become better speakers and performers through the support of their coaches and peers. 

We placed second in the region, with Megan, Carolina, Angelina, Piper, Jesse, Venkat, Jeremy, and Millie and Andrew all taking individual honors. 

This past weekend at super-regionals, Megan won her way to state competition, as did Carolina, with Piper and Angelina earning alternate spots in their categories.   

This was designed by Millie, I think based on an in-joke with some of the kids from Good Counsel, a private school in Olney, Maryland.  This meet took place the same day as VHSL Super-Regionals. Alyson was with Andrew and Millie at Metros while I was in Fredericksburg with the VHSL crew.

Millie and Andrew took first place in the Arlington region, and they’ll be competing this May at the National Catholic Forensics League tournament in Chicago this May. Plenty of time to practice for the big stage, and plenty of time to start designing and pressing more buttons to bring with us. 

The stated goal of my two-week Julius Caesar unit in AP Language and Composition was to further students’ skills in rhetorical analysis. But there was also hidden goal. I wanted students to complete the unit (which ended right before Thanksgiving break) with an appreciation of Shakespeare. I wanted students to enjoy reading Shakespeare. I had a plan to achieve this. 

I formulated this plan by compiling input from my students, most of whom could not have been more resistant to the unit. When I hinted that we would be reading Shakespeare, they groaned. I teach two sections of AP Lang for a combined total of fifty two students. At the beginning of class a week prior to the unit I assigned them an anonymous pre-reading survey, which I had them complete on their phones. I only gave them a few minutes to complete it, with no time to refine their arguments; I simply wanted to know how they felt. 

They let me know their issues.  71% of students agreed or strongly agreed that they dislike reading Shakespeare (72% if you round up)…

Their explanations were typical of what I’ve heard the past three years from my students…

Their issues with Shakespeare, so they said, boiled down to three general gripes: 

It’s hard to read

It’s not interesting 

It’s not relevant (“overhyped”) 

To each of these complaints I had a response: 

It’s hard to read? Much of the writing in a college-level course like AP Lang has challenging diction and dated syntax. Granted, Shakespeare may be on the extreme end of the spectrum, but how else do you better unless you practice? I told my students they should be thanking me for the opportunity for guided practice to gain greater proficiency. (They did not thank me.) 

It’s not interesting? How can you make that judgement when you didn’t take the time to understand it? 

It’s not relevant? Shakespeare’s overhyped? HOW DARE YOU! 

The students accepted my rebuttals, but I could tell that I hadn’t won them over, which was in keeping with my previous honors and AP classes. I’ve found it surprising how much more skeptical these grade-conscious students are compared to the less academically driven students I used to teach. 

I spent my first seven years teaching at an alternative school in Frederick County, Virginia. I taught Shakespeare every semester, and never out of a mandate or a desire to frustrate students. Indeed, it just felt obvious, the same way a chemistry teacher exposes her students to the periodic table. During my seven years I taught whatever play I thought would connect best the group — Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, Much Ado about Nothing, the Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet. I took for granted the positive response Shakespeare received each semester — it was a given. Shakespeare, like Ben Johnson famously wrote, is for all time. Why shouldn’t his works be enjoyed by an apathetic high school senior in the Shenandoah Valley? Now I’m not saying that at the conclusion of the unit students were begging for more Shakespeare, but I never heard the amount of spurious arguments that filled the comments in my anonymous survey. 

But I don’t think the students in the anonymous survey were being completely truthful about their issues. While my students at the alternative school were not scholars, they were, however, comfortable not understanding every line of Shakespeare, and they were ok working through the text as a class. In our extremely structured (and often boring) alternative school environment, they enjoyed the opportunity to read the plays out loud and discuss the decisions of the characters, watching different interpretations. 

So why is the attitude toward Shakespeare so much more hostile with students for whom every metric would suggest are much stronger students? Students in honors and AP classes, from my observation, are suspicious of a text they can’t understand immediately. Most of them understand that language has evolved over four hundred years and Shakespeare wrote during a time that prized baroque wordplay– but that doesn’t mean they value it. To them it just means more work, which they will do, if begrudgingly, because they care about their grade. For my students at the alternative school, reading Shakespeare was just a way to fill the monotony of their school day. Most cared about their grades only to the point of passing class so they didn’t have to take it again. I remember watching the Laurence Fishburn Othello with a group of students who would all ultimately drop out of school before earning their diploma. That morning, however, they were enthralled by Shakespaeare. I think the high school students I now teach — most of whom have aspirations of not just attending college, but attending an elite college — are dismissive of Shakespeare because they associate the bard with added stress. If we could read the plays without grades attached, with just a simple goal to comprehend the works, savor the language, enjoy the experience, maybe their response would be different. 

We’ll never know, though, because I wasn’t about to teach an entire play without summative assignments. But I did have some plans to set students up for success as much as possible… 

1. Spend only five classes on the play. A recurring complaint from students is often that they spent an entire month or more reading Romeo and Juliet. I sympathize with this. However, to meaningfully work through a play in two weeks, I asked students to read outside of class. For Julius Caesar, I felt that the most important acts to read in class were Acts I and III. For homework I assigned Act II one night, and Act IV and V another. I gave a brief multiple choice quiz at the beginning of subsequent classes to hold them accountable for the reading. And unlike our class’s work with Shakespeare, which never used any modernized translations, I offered them links to No Fear Shakespeare for their homework. There’s no way to stop them, anyway, and I figured that if they at least understood the plot, we would be in a good place to engage with the text as a class.
2. Supply as much contemporary relevance to the text as possible. This is a play that deals with the nature of leadership, civic responsibility, the power of rhetoric, and the unstable power of the unwashed masses — among other things. It doesn’t take much to see modern parallels to contemporary events and to our AP Language and Composition class, which is all about close analysis of rhetoric. In preparing my lessons I relied heavily on Paul Cantor’s political analysis of the play, which I even offered as a resource to my students, a few of whom watched the lectures.
3. Provide activities that relate directly to the course. I gave a roadmap of the unit to my students to help them prepare for each class. Our stated goal was to improve rhetorical analysis, so we analyzed three different works of rhetoric from the play, first as a class, then in groups, then in small groups for a grade. At the end of the play I put together a series of Socratic-ish questions. I assigned pairs of students a side on and gave them thirty minutes to research and prepare an argument — pivoting from analyzing argument to crafting arguments of their own.  

The unit ended the Friday before Thanksgiving break. After the final summative activity, I made students complete the post-unit survey with the same circumstances — anonymous, short amount of time, just get your thoughts out.  

 

Reading their responses, I was pleased that many now felt neutral, with several students appreciating some of my conscious decisions in planning the lessons. Also, there weren’t as many complaints about relevance! Yet many of the same complaints remained: language is tough, plot is uninteresting. Students in general still seemed as receptive to Shakespeare as Macbeth to a ghost: “Avaunt, and quit my sight!”

In terms of rhetorical analysis, the unit had helped sharpen their skills. The time spent analyzing Marc Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral produced some of the most cogent and persuasive analysis I’d read from some students all year.

But my hidden goal of improving students’ appreciation of Shakespeare could not be regarded as anything better than a moderate failure. I went into the unit knowing that I probably wouldn’t succeed. But that’s a risk worth taking.

Because Shakespeare is indeed a writer for all time, one of the few writers for whom I am determined to shove down my students’ collective consciousness, and I’m not going to be satisfied until I am able to teach his work in such a way that students can’t help but at least acknowledge the value of his writing. I already have ideas for next year. I think I should do more to convey Shakespeare’s place as a foundation of Western literature. Like classical epics and biblical stories, you need to be cognizant of them, even if you don’t like them. You also need to be aware of his influence on literature. Perhaps a chapter from Steven Greenblatt’s very readable and instructive Will in the World might help. 

I’ll continue adding ideas. I’m planning to teach Othello with my English 12 classes, and hopefully what I’ve learned this fall will help improve their experience. I’m not delusional enough to think that I’ll convert every student I teach. I understand that my clients are teens. But I don’t want them to be philistines.

A few weeks ago I began to notice these angular paper wedges lodged in the school’s drop ceiling. I’m not sure exactly when it started, but it seemed to coincide with the clocks changing and the weather turning colder. They were easy enough to miss if you weren’t looking up.

But once I started paying attention, I realized they were everywhere. 

In the cafeteria…

In the English hallway…

In my classroom! 

Several times this week I’ve picked up dislodged ceiling darts (that’s what the youth call them) from the floor. Every time it reminds me of my childhood when we’d find quartz arrowheads in the cow pasture. 

Like arrowheads, there’s a handmade character to each of these darts. You see it in the competence of the folding, the tightness of the construction, sometimes even in the decorations they add.

In the beginning of the spring I sometimes have my students write a haiku on the wings of origami cranes and hide them around the school. Where that project is meant to be a serene celebration of spring’s allure and possibilities, these paper darts — jagged, annoying, made out of boredom, hurled chaotically into the ceiling —  seem like the bleak response to that project’s optimism. Instead of a staid haiku they seem to contain manifestations of students’ stress in these final days before the Thanksgiving break: “AP Calc” “College Apps” “SAT scores” “GPA” “Retakes”.  

I assembled a spread of four darts on Friday and had a student with way too much authority on the topic analyze them. 

I asked the student to explain the appeal of these darts. “They’re fun,” she said tersely. 

Yes, fun for the students — and annoying for everyone else involved. They’re a waste of paper and an added burden to the custodial staff. Students could surely make more constructive use of their time. This year, for example, I’m trying to make a thousand origami cranes with PEER. If every one of these darts in the school was a crane, we’d be much closer to our goal. (We’re currently at 290.) 

But part of me enjoys the timelessness of these dumb things.  As long as there has been paper, students have been finding ways to avoid using it for learning. It’s low-tech and there’s no permanent damage. The students I’ve spoken with take a charming amount of pride in their folding technique and in the way they launch the darts at the ceiling.

I was covering a class for a colleague on Friday, and in the final minutes before the bell found myself interrogating a table of students about the fad. 

“You should see Brandon throw them,” said one student. “No one has better technique than Brandon. He does it like this.” The student linked his hands before him and thrust them at the ceiling. 

“Brandon’s good. But no one’s gotten them in that high ceiling in the stairwell,” another student solemnly informed me. “It’s just too high.”   

I tried to make a connection with these students over a similar type of mischief that was popular when I was in high school. I told them a story about this guy I knew named Roach who would spit on the ceiling during Algebra and proceed to catch the spit in his mouth as it dripped down (classic Roach!). The students were horrified. 

Hopefully the paper dart fad will pass as quickly as it emerged. For now, I just hope that for all its annoyance, it’s providing students with a relatively harmless outlet for the pre-holiday stress.

Who knows, maybe I’ll try making one this week…

John Champe High School’s third annual Poetry Out Loud finals took place last Thursday. The contest is a nationally-sponsored high school contest structured like a spelling bee, where instead of spelling words students are reciting (previously published) poems.   

There are a lot of folks who deserve credit for helping make the night a success…. 

-Aylssa Russell and Alyson Mullee, two of the four teachers in our English department who participated in the event this year with their classes. Without their participation over the past month, the event wouldn’t have happened. They deserve praise (along with Peter Kim, who did it with all his classes), since the winners of their class competitions made up all the participants in the school finals. (I did the competition with my two classes of seniors, but the winners refused to go to the extra length of memorizing a second poem for the finals [come on, seniors!]).  

-Jesse Dill, last year’s second-place finalist, and the night’s master of ceremonies. He agreed without hesitation when I asked if he would host the event, meeting with me several times throughout the week to confer on the script and the night’s proceedings. His joyfulness belies a fearless tenacity, a love for learning for which most students only offer lip service.  

-Jeff Horvath, the Instructor Facilitator for Technology at Champe, who was in charge of the livestream, which he has since posted in the archives on the school website. Jeff truly embodies the ideals of an instructional facilitator, offering thoughtful ways to integrate technology to meaningfully move forward educational goals. He also sacrificed his own time to make it possible, staying late on a Thursday night to supervise the many different camera rigs used to film the event. 

-Aubrey Skavdahl and Adam Howells, two colleagues who agreed to serve as judges.

This was my third year organizing the event, which I felt went smoothly despite a few technical snags. The POL banner, for example, was wrinkled after spending a year in my basement. Certain Youtube personalities claim that a blast of sustained hot air can smooth out wrinkles in vinyl. After spending thirty minutes standing in front of the banner with my wife’s purple hair dryer (and making my TA do it for another thirty minutes), I can confidently say this is FALSE. But, as Jeff pointed out to me, no one is looking at the wrinkles on the banner — they’re there to watch the students. So many parents showed up we had to grab extra chairs from adjacent classrooms, another small problem that was easily solved with student volunteers. Aside from the livestream cutting out for one student’s performance, there were really no other technical flaws. The environment was suitable for viewers to enjoy the competition.  

And was it a strong competition. Click through the livestream to any performer and admire the student’s attention to all aspects of recitation. Within the very strict physical parameters of the competition (they must stand in front of the mic, which they cannot touch) they were able to embody the messages from a wide variety of classic and contemporary writers — Robert Graves, Maya Angelou, Calvin Forbes, Huang Fan. During the awards I made it a point to stress to the competitors their talent and poise. It was markedly stronger than the previous two school finals. Part of that may have come from the fact that we held the competition a week later than in year’s past, offering students more time to prepare. But that’s probably selling short the students’ talent and dedication. Multiple participants showed up very early in their excitement to perform, and offered valuable assistance setting up the room.    

These students’ talent was made all the more focused due to our location, which changed from the library as in year’s past to the peer tutoring room upstairs. I was always frustrated at the last two competitions by the lack of parent support. Most competitors were dropped off by their parents and instructed to text when they were done. I’ll allow that some parents have busy evening schedules. That didn’t make it any less frustrating to have the competition take place in a mostly empty library, the students’ words echoing off the bookshelves. This year the peer tutoring room was packed to full capacity, making for a more intense environment that I think brought out the best in students’ performances.   

This year’s winner was Piper Won, the same winner as last year and the year prior. Piper will move on to regional competition in Manassas this winter. 

Her advice to future performers was to “Pick a poem that isn’t crazy short or crazy long, make it something that you relate to, make sure that you can find particular areas where you can insert your own expression.” 

She reflected on the value choosing poems that connect with you. “The first poem I ever did was [Claude McKay’s] “If We Must Die”, because I can be a stubborn person, and I identified with the heroic tone and assertive tone.” 

Other participants commented on the benefits of watching others perform. “I think it’s really interesting to see the poems others pick,” said runner-up Carolina Muñoz-Velazquez. “If there is one poem performed by two performers, it’s fun to see their different interpretations. It’s fun to bond with your peers who are all nervous and in the same boat together.” 

Carolina, a two-year participant in Poetry Out Loud, then made an important observation about the great value of Poetry Out Loud as a way to highlight talent in the school, which ultimately is the reason I enjoy organizing it every year. 

“You’re around all these different classmates from different grades and you get to recognize that they have all that talent,” she said. “Poetry Out Loud gives a lot of opportunities to kids whose talent goes completely under the radar.

I saw my first Swivl a year ago during a professional development session, and was thoroughly creeped out by it. The device itself looked unassuming, an iPad nestled in a small bowl-shaped device mounted atop a tripod, so bland-looking that I barely noticed it when I entered the room. Then the session began. As the instructor began moving about the room, I heard beside me a faint robotic whirring. The iPad wasn’t just statically recording her presentation — it was tracking her movements around the room as she presented her lecture, keeping her centered in the frame of the recording at all times, attentive as a dog on a treat, guided by the usb-sized device worn on a lanyard by the instructor. I don’t remember much about the content of this particular professional development session, but I do remember distinctly how much the Swivl made me unnerved (or should I say unnervd?).  

This past Wednesday, it was my sixth block AP Language and Composition students who got to experience that same sensation. 

I had set up a Swivl the back of the classroom. Watching my students gather around the device at the beginning of class, I identified with their nervous energy. I was reminded of a news story from a few years ago. In 2015 Canadian scientists developed HitchBOT, a friendly robot meant as a social experiment in human kindness. As you may or may not remember, HitchBOT met its grisly end in Philadelphia, where it was decapitated. While I didn’t think my students would be quite so brutal toward the Swivl, they certainly weren’t at ease by the way it was constantly tracking me as I moved around the room preparing for the start of class.      

“Teachers own the recording process and get the support they need,” the Swivl website claims, adding that “coaches are much more efficient with their time, and Administrators get the access and oversight they need.”

I was doing this less for oversight and support and more for the sake of experimenting with new technology made available to the staff at Champe, which had been brought to my attention in a recent technology committee meeting. I wanted to see how much I might learn about myself and my teaching from the experience. I had a full class prepared that I felt was representative of my teaching style, with several different activities emphasizing core concepts and learning objectives (we were focusing on the value of evidence and commentary in an argument).  

Here’s the whole video of the class:

https://cloud.swivl.com/v/e8a562356d836433f81d9ac44d47d134

After watching the video, I identified several areas of improvement: 

1. I don’t emphasize wait time after asking a question. I also don’t consistently give students time to collaborate on an answer. I try to do this once a class, moving around and singling out a student I know has the correct answer, making them look good in front of their peers. I did not do this enough during this lesson. In fact, I did much of the opposite, critiquing students in the heat of their argument, offering tweaks to shaky claims without giving students a chance to revise it privately. This class of students is well behaved and gracefully endures this sort of feedback, but how much more impactful would the lessons be if I more consistently gave students a chance to succeed instead of correcting them in public?  
2. I should have made better use of the supplementary microphones that are provided to record student comments. I balked at using them because 1) it seemed creepy to mic the students 2) it didn’t seem possible that students would be comfortable enough to act normally during small group activities if they knew that everything they said was being recorded. I’d like to see how other teachers get around this, because the video feels incomplete without being able to better hear the student discussions during the large and small group portions of my lesson. 
3. I speak too fast during lectures and instructions. Maybe it’s nervousness, maybe it’s because I know what I want to say and am more concerned with expressing it than making sure I present it in a way that it is easily accessible to my students. But I found myself sympathizing with sixth block as they valiantly endeavored to decipher my hastily expressed directions and edicts on evidence and commentary. 

“We believe teachers in K12 schools deserve the support they need to make big impacts in the classroom,” proclaims the Swivl website. “That’s why we designed Swivl Teams to make it easy for teachers and coaches to record and share video with others to get essential support and feedback. By collaborating over teacher recorded video, coaches can spend more time focused on coaching and less time traveling between classrooms.” 

I mentioned my experience with Swivl to a colleague, who observed the parallels to the Dave Egger’s dystopian novel The Circle, in which society devolves into a state in which everyone is recording every moment of their lives. With its ease of installation, I can easily see a world where Swivl exists in every classroom. Is that a good thing? Does every class merit documentation? Should I should treat Swivl the same way Philadelphians treated HitchBOT?   

For now, I’m fortunate to be in a place where I get to use this technology for my own improvement, not as a means to satisfy my superiors. From my experience, Swivl is an easy-to-use tool that makes a teacher explicitly aware of his/her strengths and weaknesses. It efficiently catalogs a class’s events in a way that is more efficient than a standard video recording, more objective of your performance during those ninety minutes than an observer’s notes. I plan to use Swivl again, in hopes that it will help me become a better teacher (or should I say teachr?).  

My cousin, a state dairy inspector, can look at a Holstein for one minute and accurately assess the cow’s age, health, and profitability. I have acquired a slightly different skill: I can look at a student for one second and tell if he or she is going to ask me for a letter of recommendation.  

I’ve gained the skill through experience. This fall has been filled with requests, mostly from my former AP Language and Composition. They smile nervously, make brief attempts at pleasantries. Then they broach the question,  always with the exact same phrasing: “So…I was wondering…”. They drag out the ellipses, most unable to even finish the question, as if they’re asking me for something outrageous, like a car loan or a kidney.      

To them, the prospect of writing an essay that outlines their strengths is a nightmarish task. As talented as my students are, they often struggle with identifying and writing meaningfully about what makes them unique and commendable. It’s tough as a teenager to be objective about yourself. It’s made more difficult now that they spend so much time using social media to set unrealistic expectations for themselves. For me, though, it’s (almost) never a problem to write positively about a former student. My answer to their requests is (almost) always an unequivocal yes — after which the student thanks me and leaves. I then add the student’s name to the spreadsheet of letter requests. 

After that, all that’s left is the writing of the letter. Like I said, it’s usually easy to think of reasons that make a student commendable. Sometimes, though, I get frustrated by the unknown aspect of writing letters of rec. When I write anything — an email, a text message, a blog post — I try to be mindful of my audience. What do I need to write to achieve my purpose? How do I get what I want? What will be the effect of my words? As I’ve worked my way through my spreadsheet of names this fall, I’ve been frustrated by the letter of rec’s effect, or rather the ambiguity of its effect. Compared to most forms of writing, they exist in a vacuum, read by an unresponsive audience. I’ll never know how closely my letter was read by an admissions officer — or if it was even read at all. I’ll never know how much a student’s acceptance or rejection is due to me. Sometimes it feels like shouting compliments into the void. It’s a selfish impulse, but I want to know how much my effort mattered. If anything, it could help give me direction in writing future letters.  

I received some guidance this week after speaking with Matt Kaberline, an English teacher at Freedom High School whose prior experience as an admissions officer for Regis College and University of Mary Washington gives him plenty of authority on the genre. We were both attending a professional development session on Turnitin this Thursday in Ashburn. During a break I asked him straight up how much a letter of rec really mattered.  

“It can make or break a student’s application,” he said. He described how admissions officers representing different regions often have to fight for their bubble candidates, students who aren’t an easy “yes” or “no”. The letters of rec were often a deciding factor in the final decision.  

So what makes an effective letter? Talking with Matt has helped guide my writing process. When I asked him what they really wanted from a letter of rec, he described it simply. “How different is this class when the student is there, and how different is it when the student is not there?” he said. For me this emphasized the value of identifying a student’s interpersonal skills and character, something that can’t be assessed from a GPA or SAT score. Sometimes I want to brag about how smart a student is, but as much as possible I need to consider their interaction with their peers and contributions to the class environment as well. A college has access to plenty of data in an application, but they rely on letters of rec (as well as the student’s own writing) for a clearer picture of who this student is and whether they would be a valuable addition. 

The good news is that most of my students are ambitious in their college choices, and while my letter may not factor at all into their acceptance to their safety school, it may play a role in the deliberation of their dream school. That’s incentive enough for me to stop worrying so much about my letter’s effect and simply focus on writing a clear and coherent portrait of what made my student stand out in my classroom.