Personally, I think it’s a mistake to approach classic literature with high school students as something they should try to “understand “. Set them tasks to play with, it not tackle it as if it’s something difficult and daunting. Then only assess them for their attempt to follow the rules I set, not whether they “understood” anything. Writing their own sonnets for example. If they followed the rhyme and metrical rules correctly that was enough, however mad and nonsensical it came out. We’d all just fall about laughing. Send-ups were popular and doing them in a silly voice or singing them etc. but it gave them an experience of how much fun it could be. Romeo and Juliet was also a huge hit with these kids, including very reluctant or even semi literate kids because they would perform short scenes in groups. It would take about 6-8 weeks of rehearsals because the teaching of it was through directing them and that was about encouraging each of them to find what there was in the character that they connected to. The “meaning “ was gradually understood through interaction with their own parts. Even the most unlikely kids would come away thinking this dude was a freakin genius. WS would have been horrified by the dour way his work is treated in schools (and universities). The man had a ball writing this stuff and giving kids access to the fun of it is the top priority.
Way back in the 80’s I was at a private school, and I had the best literature teacher I ever had. He offered $20 to anyone who would write a sonnet correctly, only two students succeeded, but I did try. He also read Beowulf in the original to us during lunch break, no assignment, no tests, he just wanted us to hear the old English. We read as a group, The Tempest, and King Lear.
I taught Biology to High Schoolers a few years ago, their attention span is so much less than when I was their age.
Kudos to you. The thing that killed literature for me in high school was having teachers who had already an understanding they wanted me to arrive at. I rarely ever agreed. I had much more fun when teachers just wanted us to form opinions and accepting our opinions as valid as long as we could explain them well, even if they weren't the well known scholarly opinions that already existed. I also think, having written a profuse amount of poetry at the time, seeing people tell me time and time again "I know exactly what you mean" followed by thoughts and stories that had nothing actually to do with what I meant, always made me wonder how many of these classic artists and writers would simply laugh at us, if they heard what was being taught as "fact" in reasoning alone. In the end, I loved listening to people's thoughts on my poems back then simply because they felt a connection and then decided to share a moment of vulnerability to me, and seeing what my poems meant to them was far more interesting and important than them understanding what it meant to me when I wrote it. The writer has their relationship with what they create, and in the end every reader has their relationship with it afterwards, and I doubt the majority of the time if it's ever relatively the same one.
There is a story of Ray Bradbury sneaking into the back of a classroom that was teaching Dandelion Wine, and him arguing about the meaning of the work with the professor incognito. 🥸
As an English Lit Major. I loved Shakespeare. But I'm autodidactic. I'd read all of the 500 classic books 📚 before I was 13 years old. College was fairly easy for me, except I had three young children to raise. I paid for my own education. There's a disconnect with Gen Y kids . Alphaa children are hooked on their tablets and phones 📱. If they can't do reports from their ChatGpt or some site, they really don't do them. An annotated bibliography would send them into a tail spin. How 🕉 will they survive 🤔?
Society will not notice until the people that fixed the mistakes, who will be people that learned to think from actually writing their own reports and papers, and processing long form works leave the workforce. Then we will suddenly be unable to fix things, there will be a small cohort of trouble shooters who where intentionally isolated from the internet by their parents that will be able to build new structures to replace the failing ones.
It's a fine idea, but it is, in addition, also possible to teach how the act of understanding something is an exciting adventure... It's being an explorer and a hunter of hidden treasures. "Can you find the treasure of this story?"
This is lovely. There is a (1984?) paper by Barak Rosenshine called ‘Active, Silent and Controlled Classroom Discussions’ and it narrates these issues beautifully across three different classrooms. It also reminds me how every year I taught Hamlet, my students would teach me new insights. And because they learned they were capable of making those insights, they loved Hamlet. Great work!
This is fabulous. I teach English in China, where we don't have quite the lack of attention spans that you face, but we have lack of engagement with the text on steroids. And it comes from a different source, which I think offers an interesting alternative view.
In China, kids are taught Classical Chinese texts far too early, and they're never taught to read Classical properly (the education system here likes to pretend it's just a dialect of modern Chinese, as part of emphasising the continuity of Chinese culture). So from a very young age, in their Chinese classrooms, it is hammered into them that you cannot extract information from a text yourself. You have to listen to the teacher's explanation. This is made infinitely worse by bad practices like insisting that students answer comprehension questions with precisely the wording memorised from the textbook, otherwise the answer is wrong. Every student gets the message loud and clear: these texts are not for you to understand or appreciate.
So, unsurprisingly, students who come to me for English classes assume much the same. They keep searching in vain in my books for the answer to the question. And they *hate* it when they can't find it. They are also spectacularly bad at listening to or reading questions. Because why bother? The wording of the question doesn't matter. In their experience, the question is only something like a Google search prompt; and they are expected to recover the right bit of text from their memory, not seriously engage with what the question asked.
Automated systems like IXL (which I've used as well, sparingly) inevitably promote the same kind of thinking. Why engage with a question text, when it's just a computer asking it? Why engage with a source text when all that's required is a strategy to narrow down the multiple choices. And that's before we note that quality varies on these platforms - some of the questions are so badly written that you would do worse to engage with them, but the multiple-guess strategies still work alright.
So, the kids are to blame for being mindless phone droids. But we teachers are also to blame for relentlessly cranking up the pressure to be correct, and then acting surprised when students take our requirements seriously.
Wow- what a perfect case study for what happens when you take away the “messiness” of engaging with a text and the valuing of students’ interpretation for the sake of critical thinking. Thanks for the perspective
So true! I moved away from China as a child but my parents (understandably) wanted me to follow something according that system so I had to memorise and recite poems that I barely understood with archaic phrasing which led me to dislike poetry. Yet in recent years I’ve developed a love for it - especially after a brilliant teacher in middle school - and even began writing my own, which my younger self would probably be baffled by LOL.
I'm so conflicted on this! It really does seem like the "bad old ways" were quite effective for some people - often not very enjoyable at the time the teaching was happening, but providing enough rigour that when the mind catches up with the content (perhaps in middle age), you end up finding the value. Maybe there's some wisdom in that!
On the other hand, if it puts off too many people during school time, then it's not serving its purpose... I dunno.
I think ultimately I come down here. Let's simplify the world into two styles of teaching: the rigour-and-memorisation style of teaching (ignoring the child's needs and enjoyment during schooling) and a more nurturing, creative style of teaching (which aims to help the child enjoy the content and express themselves). Now, it seems quite possible to me that both of these styles, when done well, can be quite effective. But I think the failure mode of the rigorous style is worse: it's just teachers yelling at kids to complete tasks they don't understand. So perhaps that's a good reason to prefer a more accommodating style of teaching that responds to the needs of kids when they're young: even when it breaks down, it doesn't end up being horrible.
What stands out is that moment where you stopped having the answer and let students see the process. That’s where things changed. Not because the text got easier, but because the thinking became visible—and suddenly, students had permission to try. I think you’re right that the issue isn’t just phones or engagement—it’s stamina, confidence, and not knowing what reading actually looks like when it’s hard. When students haven’t experienced that, silence isn’t apathy—it’s uncertainty. The instinct to simplify everything hasn’t helped. But equally, rigor on its own isn’t the answer either. What your example shows is the middle ground: high challenge, with the thinking modelled clearly.
You’re right that rigor alone isn’t the only answer. And to add, it’s not like things in my classroom have been a steady linear progression since the lesson. This is something that takes years to build. But the lesson was, at least, a glimpse into a possibility
I’m a recently retired community college English professor. It’s inspiring to read this. What stood out to me, aside from the pedagogy, was how much you’ve made visible an aspect of teaching that is all too often elided or forgotten: teaching is emotional labor and that kind of labor is far too devalued in this country’s economy overall, not just education.
I just want you to know that I tried an experiment of teaching a sonnet that was completely new to me and it wound up being one of the best sessions I’ve had!
I had a student I’m tutoring select a number 1-154. She chose 124, so we read sonnet 124 together for the first time, using my Shakespeare book, no computers, and worked out our analysis of the poem. It was the most active and engaged she’s ever been.
I really liked this read! Especially the point about students actually needing, perhaps wanting a challenge. I was just listening to a podcast about how kids are growing up on constant high-stimuli content (YouTube Shorts/AI Slop) and it made me wonder what happens when that becomes their baseline for learning, starting in infancy no less. If attention is shaped that early and with unregulated content, the transition to a classroom that requires focus and critical thinking feels like an insurmountable gap. Love this thinking and approach though; cool exercise from co-teacher too.
As a Modern Foreign Languages teacher who grew up and studied in Europe, this article struck a nerve.
The education I received was built on books, pen and paper, daily homework, and very little room to question. When I did my PGCE, I was told that model was obsolete, unengaging, and damaging to students. And I understood that critique more than most, because I later discovered I have ADHD. Without knowing it at the time, I had spent years being treated as less capable in subjects where I simply needed a different approach. The old system had real flaws, and I lived them.
But I have come to believe that the overcorrection has caused just as much damage, perhaps more.
The struggle I went through as an undiagnosed student, as frustrating and lonely as it was, forced me to find my own ways around obstacles. I spent two hours every evening doing homework, reading, writing. That built something in me. What we are producing today, by removing that friction entirely, is a generation that has never been asked to sit with difficulty long enough to overcome it.
The phones and social media are an easy target, and they are certainly part of the problem. But the more honest answer is that we, the adults, have done this. Teachers and parents have collectively moved students further and further from the experiences that develop cognitive resilience, in the name of engagement and accessibility.
And the curriculum reflects this too. I recently covered an English class that was studying Romeo and Juliet. I asked a few questions to get them thinking and quickly realised they had no sense of the historical world the play was written in, nor of Shakespeare’s own time. When I asked what they were studying in History, they said the First World War. Nothing connected to anything. I studied languages and literature for over a decade, and the most powerful thing that education gave me was the ability to see how subjects speak to each other. That crossover is exactly what is missing today, and it matters especially for neurodivergent students who need logic and context to make knowledge stick.
In my own subject I am expected to teach the architecture of a language, grammar, tenses, vocabulary, and yet the unspoken pressure is that every fifty minute lesson should feel like entertainment. That is not teaching. It is a performance that exhausts everyone and produces very little.
The answer is not a return to the fear based classrooms of my childhood. But it is not this either. It is something in between, rigorous and connected, and honest about what school actually is. Studying is a student’s job. Not a experience designed to be fun at every moment, but a real discipline with real rewards. The moment we restore that idea, in how we teach, in how we build curricula, and in how we talk about education at home, is the moment students might start taking genuine ownership of their own learning.
I love how you put this: ‘What we are producing today, by removing that friction entirely, is a generation that has never been asked to sit with difficulty long enough to overcome it.’
I’m currently tutoring a 14 year old boy whose first language is Russian. His parents are really keen for him to build a reading habit, and want me to support that. They buy him books but he can’t stick with any of them. Because he knows he’s doing it under duress. I tried to read a book last year I felt I ought to read - I abandoned it after 30 pages or so.
But now he’s asked to read ‘War and Peace’ because he wants to read a book he knows is difficult. The parents have vetoed this (for now) but I am offering him a series of Russian short stories as a ‘bridge’ to taking on the challenge he wants to take up once he’s found out for himself if 19th century Russian literature is to his taste!
‘Meeting the students where they are’ can only be the point of initiation. You then share the map and point to all the possible destinations, offering to be a guide while making it clear that much (when teaching literature) will be new to you, too, because it’s about the ‘meeting of ideas’ and all that can happen in those as-yet unknown exchanges.
And we had to read War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and many other books when we were 15 in a Russian school... I still remember how my literature teacher took the "30 summaries of great books" book from one of the desks and went on a rant about summaries being a total useless bullshit. However, 19th century Russian books are tough and I was definitely not ready for them at 15.
I think my concern is that the ideas in them are so ‘big’ that they’ll elude a young mind who’ll then just wonder what all the fuss is about … that said, I remember reading literature around that age (‘The Wasteland’ especially, and Shelley’s poems) that I knew I couldn’t grasp while also recognising they were extraordinary. And I wanted to keep reading it until I somehow found a chink in it!
I teach 8th grade Bible at a Christian school and see a lot of the same things - but I too am encouraged to see that they have a lot of curiosity, questions, and want to be trusted enough to be challenged. But also yes, the number of times I have told them they can't quote Google AI.... 🤦🏼♀️ Thanks for being willing to try new and difficult ways to help them! These are inspiring ideas!
This is a really inspiring piece, thanks Jack! I love the idea of you modelling the discomfort that is required to learn. Kahoot + games that pit students against each other are teaching students to compare themselves to others, which further perpetuates the fear of being wrong. Giving them the freedom to play can teach them to connect to the material with their own lives and ideas!
Very interesting! I'm teaching a similar age group myself (15-17 year olds), and find many of the same problems with student engagement. I really liked the idea of your meeting a new sonnet in real time in front of them. They need to understand that you don't have all the answers, and that they might well have some!
My situation is a little different though: I'm teaching English to French teenagers. The complications are not quite the same. However, with one group I also recently worked on sonnets - some of my colleagues found it a little over-ambitious. We looked at a few by English Romantics, and one or two others (including Shakespeare). Talked about the features of a sonnet, of a Romantic poem... And then they wrote one. Each student worked out an idea, with the guideline that it should be a "Sonnet for Springtime" ... but for those who wished to subvert or write against the brief, they could. And to my delight, they worked hard and managed to actually do it, demonstrating their understanding of what we'd learned. Did they write immortal lines....? Who knows. But I'm pretty sure they'll never forget doing it.
Nothing is too ambitious. I had a supervisor visit me the other day, and he said "it seemed like a lot of content, a lot to take on...now in fairness, they *did* take it on, but..." And I thought "well...what was the problem then...?"
Ironically, the best way to learn a skill is by starting off with the hard stuff, and then make way down to the easy stuff. This is likely the reason why children were taught to play chess games and instruments from a young age. It really exerts the brain. Unfortunately, if children today didn’t grow up learning those skills, it becomes rather difficult to teach them as their brains mature; and especially difficult for their teachers to do so, too. If a parent can’t do it then what are the chances that a teacher could?
Great article Jack! Your dedication to your students and to learning in general is something I really admire about you. Much too often, the challenges we need to shape our brains and lives are taken away by something shiny and new. We are losing human connection, tactile learning, and the ability to overcome a struggle, a skill that seems to be increasingly important these days.
Some of my favorite memories in English class are based around discovering meaning in something we didn’t understand, and we did it collaboratively. No one was shamed for their wrong idea, we just built around it and took what stuck. The sense of accomplishment when you reach a satisfying conclusion is something that I fear is missing these days as well.
I hope that your ideas have a wide reach - it’s nice to read something hopeful.
this scenario is so frightening. I don’t think I would’ve been the person I am today if I wasn’t so obsessed with books as a kid and teen, and even I find myself intoxicated with social media, TikTok and putting down my book at times. for someone who isn’t fully formed yet this feels nearly impossible. this approach makes a lot of sense, as much as you can try, school will never be fun or give the same dopamine hit as short form content, because education is mostly challenging yourself day after day. it’s not comfortable or “fun”. wishing you best of luck with your students!
Personally, I think it’s a mistake to approach classic literature with high school students as something they should try to “understand “. Set them tasks to play with, it not tackle it as if it’s something difficult and daunting. Then only assess them for their attempt to follow the rules I set, not whether they “understood” anything. Writing their own sonnets for example. If they followed the rhyme and metrical rules correctly that was enough, however mad and nonsensical it came out. We’d all just fall about laughing. Send-ups were popular and doing them in a silly voice or singing them etc. but it gave them an experience of how much fun it could be. Romeo and Juliet was also a huge hit with these kids, including very reluctant or even semi literate kids because they would perform short scenes in groups. It would take about 6-8 weeks of rehearsals because the teaching of it was through directing them and that was about encouraging each of them to find what there was in the character that they connected to. The “meaning “ was gradually understood through interaction with their own parts. Even the most unlikely kids would come away thinking this dude was a freakin genius. WS would have been horrified by the dour way his work is treated in schools (and universities). The man had a ball writing this stuff and giving kids access to the fun of it is the top priority.
Thanks for the encouragement! I’m excited to see them write their own sonnets in a couple weeks.
Way back in the 80’s I was at a private school, and I had the best literature teacher I ever had. He offered $20 to anyone who would write a sonnet correctly, only two students succeeded, but I did try. He also read Beowulf in the original to us during lunch break, no assignment, no tests, he just wanted us to hear the old English. We read as a group, The Tempest, and King Lear.
I taught Biology to High Schoolers a few years ago, their attention span is so much less than when I was their age.
Kudos to you. The thing that killed literature for me in high school was having teachers who had already an understanding they wanted me to arrive at. I rarely ever agreed. I had much more fun when teachers just wanted us to form opinions and accepting our opinions as valid as long as we could explain them well, even if they weren't the well known scholarly opinions that already existed. I also think, having written a profuse amount of poetry at the time, seeing people tell me time and time again "I know exactly what you mean" followed by thoughts and stories that had nothing actually to do with what I meant, always made me wonder how many of these classic artists and writers would simply laugh at us, if they heard what was being taught as "fact" in reasoning alone. In the end, I loved listening to people's thoughts on my poems back then simply because they felt a connection and then decided to share a moment of vulnerability to me, and seeing what my poems meant to them was far more interesting and important than them understanding what it meant to me when I wrote it. The writer has their relationship with what they create, and in the end every reader has their relationship with it afterwards, and I doubt the majority of the time if it's ever relatively the same one.
There is a story of Ray Bradbury sneaking into the back of a classroom that was teaching Dandelion Wine, and him arguing about the meaning of the work with the professor incognito. 🥸
As an English Lit Major. I loved Shakespeare. But I'm autodidactic. I'd read all of the 500 classic books 📚 before I was 13 years old. College was fairly easy for me, except I had three young children to raise. I paid for my own education. There's a disconnect with Gen Y kids . Alphaa children are hooked on their tablets and phones 📱. If they can't do reports from their ChatGpt or some site, they really don't do them. An annotated bibliography would send them into a tail spin. How 🕉 will they survive 🤔?
Dee Degon
512-529-5176 dddegon@gmail.com
Society will not notice until the people that fixed the mistakes, who will be people that learned to think from actually writing their own reports and papers, and processing long form works leave the workforce. Then we will suddenly be unable to fix things, there will be a small cohort of trouble shooters who where intentionally isolated from the internet by their parents that will be able to build new structures to replace the failing ones.
It's a fine idea, but it is, in addition, also possible to teach how the act of understanding something is an exciting adventure... It's being an explorer and a hunter of hidden treasures. "Can you find the treasure of this story?"
This is lovely. There is a (1984?) paper by Barak Rosenshine called ‘Active, Silent and Controlled Classroom Discussions’ and it narrates these issues beautifully across three different classrooms. It also reminds me how every year I taught Hamlet, my students would teach me new insights. And because they learned they were capable of making those insights, they loved Hamlet. Great work!
This is fabulous. I teach English in China, where we don't have quite the lack of attention spans that you face, but we have lack of engagement with the text on steroids. And it comes from a different source, which I think offers an interesting alternative view.
In China, kids are taught Classical Chinese texts far too early, and they're never taught to read Classical properly (the education system here likes to pretend it's just a dialect of modern Chinese, as part of emphasising the continuity of Chinese culture). So from a very young age, in their Chinese classrooms, it is hammered into them that you cannot extract information from a text yourself. You have to listen to the teacher's explanation. This is made infinitely worse by bad practices like insisting that students answer comprehension questions with precisely the wording memorised from the textbook, otherwise the answer is wrong. Every student gets the message loud and clear: these texts are not for you to understand or appreciate.
So, unsurprisingly, students who come to me for English classes assume much the same. They keep searching in vain in my books for the answer to the question. And they *hate* it when they can't find it. They are also spectacularly bad at listening to or reading questions. Because why bother? The wording of the question doesn't matter. In their experience, the question is only something like a Google search prompt; and they are expected to recover the right bit of text from their memory, not seriously engage with what the question asked.
Automated systems like IXL (which I've used as well, sparingly) inevitably promote the same kind of thinking. Why engage with a question text, when it's just a computer asking it? Why engage with a source text when all that's required is a strategy to narrow down the multiple choices. And that's before we note that quality varies on these platforms - some of the questions are so badly written that you would do worse to engage with them, but the multiple-guess strategies still work alright.
So, the kids are to blame for being mindless phone droids. But we teachers are also to blame for relentlessly cranking up the pressure to be correct, and then acting surprised when students take our requirements seriously.
Wow- what a perfect case study for what happens when you take away the “messiness” of engaging with a text and the valuing of students’ interpretation for the sake of critical thinking. Thanks for the perspective
So true! I moved away from China as a child but my parents (understandably) wanted me to follow something according that system so I had to memorise and recite poems that I barely understood with archaic phrasing which led me to dislike poetry. Yet in recent years I’ve developed a love for it - especially after a brilliant teacher in middle school - and even began writing my own, which my younger self would probably be baffled by LOL.
I'm so conflicted on this! It really does seem like the "bad old ways" were quite effective for some people - often not very enjoyable at the time the teaching was happening, but providing enough rigour that when the mind catches up with the content (perhaps in middle age), you end up finding the value. Maybe there's some wisdom in that!
On the other hand, if it puts off too many people during school time, then it's not serving its purpose... I dunno.
I think ultimately I come down here. Let's simplify the world into two styles of teaching: the rigour-and-memorisation style of teaching (ignoring the child's needs and enjoyment during schooling) and a more nurturing, creative style of teaching (which aims to help the child enjoy the content and express themselves). Now, it seems quite possible to me that both of these styles, when done well, can be quite effective. But I think the failure mode of the rigorous style is worse: it's just teachers yelling at kids to complete tasks they don't understand. So perhaps that's a good reason to prefer a more accommodating style of teaching that responds to the needs of kids when they're young: even when it breaks down, it doesn't end up being horrible.
Apparently Sweden is bringing back textbooks and getting rid of devices. Can’t wait to see how it goes
What stands out is that moment where you stopped having the answer and let students see the process. That’s where things changed. Not because the text got easier, but because the thinking became visible—and suddenly, students had permission to try. I think you’re right that the issue isn’t just phones or engagement—it’s stamina, confidence, and not knowing what reading actually looks like when it’s hard. When students haven’t experienced that, silence isn’t apathy—it’s uncertainty. The instinct to simplify everything hasn’t helped. But equally, rigor on its own isn’t the answer either. What your example shows is the middle ground: high challenge, with the thinking modelled clearly.
You’re right that rigor alone isn’t the only answer. And to add, it’s not like things in my classroom have been a steady linear progression since the lesson. This is something that takes years to build. But the lesson was, at least, a glimpse into a possibility
I’m a recently retired community college English professor. It’s inspiring to read this. What stood out to me, aside from the pedagogy, was how much you’ve made visible an aspect of teaching that is all too often elided or forgotten: teaching is emotional labor and that kind of labor is far too devalued in this country’s economy overall, not just education.
I just want you to know that I tried an experiment of teaching a sonnet that was completely new to me and it wound up being one of the best sessions I’ve had!
That’s great! What’d you do?
I had a student I’m tutoring select a number 1-154. She chose 124, so we read sonnet 124 together for the first time, using my Shakespeare book, no computers, and worked out our analysis of the poem. It was the most active and engaged she’s ever been.
I really liked this read! Especially the point about students actually needing, perhaps wanting a challenge. I was just listening to a podcast about how kids are growing up on constant high-stimuli content (YouTube Shorts/AI Slop) and it made me wonder what happens when that becomes their baseline for learning, starting in infancy no less. If attention is shaped that early and with unregulated content, the transition to a classroom that requires focus and critical thinking feels like an insurmountable gap. Love this thinking and approach though; cool exercise from co-teacher too.
As a Modern Foreign Languages teacher who grew up and studied in Europe, this article struck a nerve.
The education I received was built on books, pen and paper, daily homework, and very little room to question. When I did my PGCE, I was told that model was obsolete, unengaging, and damaging to students. And I understood that critique more than most, because I later discovered I have ADHD. Without knowing it at the time, I had spent years being treated as less capable in subjects where I simply needed a different approach. The old system had real flaws, and I lived them.
But I have come to believe that the overcorrection has caused just as much damage, perhaps more.
The struggle I went through as an undiagnosed student, as frustrating and lonely as it was, forced me to find my own ways around obstacles. I spent two hours every evening doing homework, reading, writing. That built something in me. What we are producing today, by removing that friction entirely, is a generation that has never been asked to sit with difficulty long enough to overcome it.
The phones and social media are an easy target, and they are certainly part of the problem. But the more honest answer is that we, the adults, have done this. Teachers and parents have collectively moved students further and further from the experiences that develop cognitive resilience, in the name of engagement and accessibility.
And the curriculum reflects this too. I recently covered an English class that was studying Romeo and Juliet. I asked a few questions to get them thinking and quickly realised they had no sense of the historical world the play was written in, nor of Shakespeare’s own time. When I asked what they were studying in History, they said the First World War. Nothing connected to anything. I studied languages and literature for over a decade, and the most powerful thing that education gave me was the ability to see how subjects speak to each other. That crossover is exactly what is missing today, and it matters especially for neurodivergent students who need logic and context to make knowledge stick.
In my own subject I am expected to teach the architecture of a language, grammar, tenses, vocabulary, and yet the unspoken pressure is that every fifty minute lesson should feel like entertainment. That is not teaching. It is a performance that exhausts everyone and produces very little.
The answer is not a return to the fear based classrooms of my childhood. But it is not this either. It is something in between, rigorous and connected, and honest about what school actually is. Studying is a student’s job. Not a experience designed to be fun at every moment, but a real discipline with real rewards. The moment we restore that idea, in how we teach, in how we build curricula, and in how we talk about education at home, is the moment students might start taking genuine ownership of their own learning.
I agree...the answer is something in between.
I love how you put this: ‘What we are producing today, by removing that friction entirely, is a generation that has never been asked to sit with difficulty long enough to overcome it.’
I’m currently tutoring a 14 year old boy whose first language is Russian. His parents are really keen for him to build a reading habit, and want me to support that. They buy him books but he can’t stick with any of them. Because he knows he’s doing it under duress. I tried to read a book last year I felt I ought to read - I abandoned it after 30 pages or so.
But now he’s asked to read ‘War and Peace’ because he wants to read a book he knows is difficult. The parents have vetoed this (for now) but I am offering him a series of Russian short stories as a ‘bridge’ to taking on the challenge he wants to take up once he’s found out for himself if 19th century Russian literature is to his taste!
‘Meeting the students where they are’ can only be the point of initiation. You then share the map and point to all the possible destinations, offering to be a guide while making it clear that much (when teaching literature) will be new to you, too, because it’s about the ‘meeting of ideas’ and all that can happen in those as-yet unknown exchanges.
And we had to read War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and many other books when we were 15 in a Russian school... I still remember how my literature teacher took the "30 summaries of great books" book from one of the desks and went on a rant about summaries being a total useless bullshit. However, 19th century Russian books are tough and I was definitely not ready for them at 15.
I think my concern is that the ideas in them are so ‘big’ that they’ll elude a young mind who’ll then just wonder what all the fuss is about … that said, I remember reading literature around that age (‘The Wasteland’ especially, and Shelley’s poems) that I knew I couldn’t grasp while also recognising they were extraordinary. And I wanted to keep reading it until I somehow found a chink in it!
I teach 8th grade Bible at a Christian school and see a lot of the same things - but I too am encouraged to see that they have a lot of curiosity, questions, and want to be trusted enough to be challenged. But also yes, the number of times I have told them they can't quote Google AI.... 🤦🏼♀️ Thanks for being willing to try new and difficult ways to help them! These are inspiring ideas!
This is a really inspiring piece, thanks Jack! I love the idea of you modelling the discomfort that is required to learn. Kahoot + games that pit students against each other are teaching students to compare themselves to others, which further perpetuates the fear of being wrong. Giving them the freedom to play can teach them to connect to the material with their own lives and ideas!
Very interesting! I'm teaching a similar age group myself (15-17 year olds), and find many of the same problems with student engagement. I really liked the idea of your meeting a new sonnet in real time in front of them. They need to understand that you don't have all the answers, and that they might well have some!
My situation is a little different though: I'm teaching English to French teenagers. The complications are not quite the same. However, with one group I also recently worked on sonnets - some of my colleagues found it a little over-ambitious. We looked at a few by English Romantics, and one or two others (including Shakespeare). Talked about the features of a sonnet, of a Romantic poem... And then they wrote one. Each student worked out an idea, with the guideline that it should be a "Sonnet for Springtime" ... but for those who wished to subvert or write against the brief, they could. And to my delight, they worked hard and managed to actually do it, demonstrating their understanding of what we'd learned. Did they write immortal lines....? Who knows. But I'm pretty sure they'll never forget doing it.
Don’t let anyone tell you anything’s too ambitious!
Nothing is too ambitious. I had a supervisor visit me the other day, and he said "it seemed like a lot of content, a lot to take on...now in fairness, they *did* take it on, but..." And I thought "well...what was the problem then...?"
Ironically, the best way to learn a skill is by starting off with the hard stuff, and then make way down to the easy stuff. This is likely the reason why children were taught to play chess games and instruments from a young age. It really exerts the brain. Unfortunately, if children today didn’t grow up learning those skills, it becomes rather difficult to teach them as their brains mature; and especially difficult for their teachers to do so, too. If a parent can’t do it then what are the chances that a teacher could?
This is brilliant, Jack!
Great article Jack! Your dedication to your students and to learning in general is something I really admire about you. Much too often, the challenges we need to shape our brains and lives are taken away by something shiny and new. We are losing human connection, tactile learning, and the ability to overcome a struggle, a skill that seems to be increasingly important these days.
Some of my favorite memories in English class are based around discovering meaning in something we didn’t understand, and we did it collaboratively. No one was shamed for their wrong idea, we just built around it and took what stuck. The sense of accomplishment when you reach a satisfying conclusion is something that I fear is missing these days as well.
I hope that your ideas have a wide reach - it’s nice to read something hopeful.
this scenario is so frightening. I don’t think I would’ve been the person I am today if I wasn’t so obsessed with books as a kid and teen, and even I find myself intoxicated with social media, TikTok and putting down my book at times. for someone who isn’t fully formed yet this feels nearly impossible. this approach makes a lot of sense, as much as you can try, school will never be fun or give the same dopamine hit as short form content, because education is mostly challenging yourself day after day. it’s not comfortable or “fun”. wishing you best of luck with your students!