Teaching Shakespearean Sonnets to Brain Rot 15-Year-Olds

There's hope.

I teach at a school with a fairly selective admissions process, where students score above average on standardized reading and writing skills. But most English teachers at my school agree that these “above average” numbers don’t align with what we now observe in the classroom. Although my students are sincerely respectful, diligent, and value their education, my year teaching has been characterized mostly by frustration and resentment.

It was clear to me early in the year that the majority of my students weren’t regularly exposed to literature, let alone choosing to engage with it voluntarily. Many of them struggled to name a novel they either loved or hated, or even one they were required to read for school within the last year. The cause for this vanishing literacy has been discussed ad nauseum; besides, look around, and you will see the cause. It is in front of us in plain sight. I hate to be a “it’s the phones” guy, clenching my fist and waving it at the sky, but it is hard for me to not go there.

When I was 15-years-old, I preferred playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II to reading. So this preference for digital entertainment, to me, seems natural for a teenager. And when I became a serious reader again — almost a decade later at the age of 24— it took me a long time to rebuild my stamina. But kids today, suffocated by an onslaught of digital content that projects from the palm of their hand, are given far less of a chance than I was given. The real problem, however, is the way in which schools have responded to declining literary and student-engagement. Not only have we lowered our standards and expectations, but we’ve placed too great an emphasis on “student engagement”, desperately trying to hook them by turning education into entertainment. By doing so, we have failed our students.

I didn’t like what literacy’s nosedive had done to the way I viewed my students. The ideal teacher observes a weakness in their students and responds with understanding and empathy. I, on the other hand, respond with a quiet, closeted resentment that I harbor in the depth of my soul.

I ask a fairly easy question about the plot of what we just read, and the class falls silent. This compounds with what I hear on the radio driving into work: “Latest study confirms that Gen-Z is less cognitively capable than other generations”. Consequently, I see my students as vapid, pathetic vessels because anger is an easy emotion to partake in. I think to myself that there is an ocean-sized gap between me and them, and that I’m not willing to be the one to do the hard work of fixing them.

Walt Hunter, professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, writes similarly about how he felt going into his year of teaching in his recent article “Stop Meeting Students Where They Are” for The Atlantic:

“Anecdotes and statistics about the decline of reading unsettled me. Plus, I was worried about my own raddled attention span, and I was unnerved by the apparent inevitability of AI-generated essays.”

There are multiple societal forces actively working against today’s English teacher, and because of the nature of the subject, these forces are felt sharply by the English teacher as an attack on humanity, an attack on thoughtful conversation, and an attack on connection.

In recent weeks, my colleague has returned to work from maternity leave to co-teach my class. I was eager to see her fresh perspective. In her first week back, she observed the same woodenness and quietness in my students that I’ve been facing all year.

We are doing a unit on poetry, and I thought we’d look at some Shakespearean sonnets. One day, she looked at Sonnet 18 with them: “They’re just staring at the paper with their mouths open, hoping the meaning of the poem is going to come to them through some divine intervention. They aren’t even trying”. I fully expected this and was not surprised. I knew that the sonnets would be near impossible for them to read; that’s why I only wanted to have them read a few. Whatever gaps they had I would fill in with my explanation, and we would move on.

My co-teacher came up with an idea. She said to me: “I’m going to project a Shakespearean sonnet on the board that you have never seen before. They are going to watch you struggle through it, and they are going to see what it takes to authentically annotate something to attempt to understand it”.

This was a good idea because it targeted a pitfall of my teaching: that I already know the answer— a predetermined answer I want my students to come to. Therefore, when I ask the class a question, they are aware that there is an answer in my head I want them to arrive at. This method can stifle students’ voice.

So, I stood at the front of the classroom that day, feeling exposed, sight-reading Shakespearean sonnets. With most of the sonnets, I, with the help of the class, could only get to about 75% understanding and accuracy at best. But my confusion — my apparent struggle and frustration in understanding each new sonnet— was key for my students. They felt free to posit their interpretations and even to disagree with me.

In each session, a student shared a thought or possibility that not only I had failed to see but was also ultimately accurate. One student couldn’t wipe the smile off her face when she figured out a metaphor that stumped both me and my co-teacher. “This was fun”, she and her classmate said to each other when the bell rang. In my class of over-achievers, they laughed at me as I stood in the front of the classroom wiping the sweat off my brow: “This is pissing me off”, I said, as they were sharing comments that were more insightful and useful than mine.

In his article “Stop Meeting Students Where They Are”, Walt Hunter writes about his new approach for having his college students write. He wanted his students to participate in real-time, adrenaline-driven writing that opened itself up to failure. Writing that forced them to face their fear without the scaffolding of drafting, planning, or AI:

I devised simple essay topics that asked students to write about their own difficulties as readers. One was: “Write about a moment in an Emily Dickinson poem that you don’t understand.” […]. John Keats called this state of being “negative capability,” a condition in which the writer learns to live in a perpetual state of uncertainty. If it was really true that the students couldn’t read, then it was up to me to put the books in their way and make them deal with them.

Hunter’s experience confirms my instinct that this is the only way out of the darkness. Rather than throwing our hands up and hiding the challenging stuff from our students, we need to double down on it as the cure. Rather than giving them short-form, comfortable content and meeting them where they are (many English teachers now refrain from teaching the full-length novel, opting for excerpts and only short stories) we need to “stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up”, as Walt Whitman once said.

All the while, it’s useful to normalize the struggle of reading, emphasizing the process, not the product, of close-reading and confusion. We have to then use our writing to pull ourselves out of the darkness. There’s a detectable apprehension that pervades my students. We need to destroy that need to be perfect, that need to have the right answer right away— one that has been conditioned by the Chromebooks and AI we have handed to each of them.

The more I hear about teachers jumping through hoops to make AI “educational” in the English classroom, the more I believe that a full retreat into wilderness — a return to simplicity— is the best answer. Schools place multiple degrees of separation between the student and the page, forgetting that the bare literature itself is the answer to the problem. Give them a pencil, a paper, and a book, and see what happens.

My co-teacher and I have replaced our students’ Chromebooks with dusty, heavy, and monstrous dictionaries. Raised with Chromebooks, to them, the dictionary becomes the new, alluring technology. In another assignment in which students rifled through piles of magazines, digging for “found poetry”, many of them were delayed from starting the assignment because they were too enthralled in the physical tactility of the medium. They sat in silence, flipping through the pages, pointing out things they found amusing to one another.

In the quiet pauses that ring throughout my classroom, I question if any of these kids have ever actually been in a class that revolves around stimulating discussion. Or did they glide through their experience using ChatGPT to generate any kind of written response? Did they mostly spend class time sitting in silence looking at their Chromebooks? Did class mostly consist of clicking away at pre-loaded, “gamified” activities from learning software that teachers are told to use in order to justify the district’s purchase? Ask any of my students what they think of IXL Learning —the software our school pushes on them — and they hate it. When I was student-teaching, I thought it odd the teachers’ reliance on “Kahoot”, a game-based learning platform that pits students against another, ranking their performance.

Teachers claim they have been dealing with a crisis of student engagement. They pose thoughtful questions to their students and are faced with uncomfortable silence. But too often, I think, they are misinterpreting the silence for apathy or lack of engagement, and are not identifying it for what it really is: a lack of critical thinking.

Mistakenly, we then bend over backwards to think of fun, creative ways to “engage” our students, to “speak their language”. And then it doesn’t work. We then complain to each other in the break room that “these kids don’t enjoy anything. How can I get a book to compete for their attention with TikTok?” But if I was a student who constantly had teachers jumping through hoops to make learning “fun” or “relatable”, I would become exhausted. The push would have the opposite effect, especially because it would be coming from a teacher. Especially if I didn’t know how to read. I’d want to be taught how to read.

Unfortunately, learning has been reduced to a simplified game. In a desperate attempt to make learning more accessible, students have been given the wrong idea of what education is supposed to be. But the kids don’t want it anymore. They need rigor. They want to be taught the old school way. They want to be challenged. They want to learn critical thinking skills. Teachers have to get past the fabricated fear that students will resist any semblance of a challenge. School, in some ways, has to become boring again.