We can miss living in a book when it ends.

Right now, I miss living in the foggy, secretive, interconnected, overwhelming, funny, and ultimately beautiful world of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.

Last winter, and I identified this Charles Dickens doorstopper of a novel as one we had each wanted to read for a long time for different reasons, and we batted around how to tackle such a long read as busy English teachers.

We ended up planning backwards, as teachers are apt to do. Originally, the book was published in 19 serialized parts over 19 months, and we decided to read it in those original installments over the course of 19 weeks. The finish line for the book would be our last week of summer break.

We invited others to join us, and almost 40 teachers from across 5 continents did! Before long, we were logging weekly insights and literary banter in a multi-tabbed GoogleDoc that is long-winded and labyrinthine enough to make any Victorian novelist jealous.

But now that it’s over, I miss it.

Exactly what do I miss? Let me break it down. After that, I’ll reflect on what this teaches me about teaching literature and the helping students, I hope, discover the deep and abiding satisfaction of slow, intentional reading of challenging texts.

What I Miss

1. Characters who became friends and enemies

Dickens writes characters that can somehow be genuinely, deeply good or troublingly, connivingly evil without being caricatures, and so many of the characters felt like people I knew by the end of the novel.

I wanted Esther Summerson to muster confidence in herself. I wanted Miss Flite and her collection of caged birds to find freedom and hope. I grew to love the nobility of George, who seemed like a minor character at first and turned out to be an important moral linchpin later on. These were good, flawed, frustrated people, and I enjoyed keeping them as friends for a while.

2. Language that aspires to more than clarity

Dickens’ sentences are seldom unclear, but they are more verbose than sentences we — or even literary authors — craft today. And now we live in a world where AI affords us clarity in a keystroke but often saps voice and emotion from our ideas and our words. Victorian language was refreshing.

When describing the streets of London, Dickens writes about “smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun” (Dickens 13).

When a character has simply had enough of another character’s tomfoolery, she writes, “I had nothing to offer in reply to this exposition, and therefore took my leave,” a line I may need to rewrite in present tense to deliver the next time a student bugs me (Dickens 935).

3. Plot elements that sizzle with relevance

A court case drags on forever, consuming resources of everyone involved. Secrets and past traumas haunt present relationships. Misunderstandings and ignorance descend into hilarity with a twist of despair. High and low classes live very different lives while inhabiting the same geographies.

I wrote in my online response one week that Bleak House is an ambitious “everything novel,” because it leaves no stone of the human experience unturned.

And as I read Dickens’ characters and social commentaries, I realized how every era faces the same conundrums, even if it’s all a bit foggier and windswept in nineteenth century England.

Bleak House, first published between March 1852 and September 1853, sizzles with relevance, and when Dickens burns the aristocracy or lawyers or dysfunctional parenting, often with sharp humor, it feels very much like he’s commenting on the world I inhabit in 2026.

4. Community that makes reading a prismatic experience

Without a group of readers checking in each week, co-creating a common record of our thinking, I might not have persevered in reading this book this long.

I enjoyed how often in our reading group’s commentary someone would highlight a sentence that I didn’t even remember reading and shine a light on double meaning, symbolic diction, or a revealing turn of phrase that opened up new interpretive possibilities.

I grew to look forward to each respondent’s voice: Some wrote with strokes of humor or sarcasm, others with wisdom gained from previous readings of this same text, others with historical insights from their background knowledge and travels.

This experience felt like reading through a prism in the best way. On my own, I could see the light in my reading, but my community of readers split that light and showed me all the colors inside of it.

What I Want to Remember

1. Talk and write about characters — a lot!

Our students need to invest in characters if they are going to love novels. (SIDE NOTE: they need to be reading entire novels in school, not just excerpts leveraged to build and test skills. Never thought I’d have to say that, but here we are.) They need to think through the reasons behind those characters’ decisions and empathize with character complexities and changes over the arc of a longer story.

Students must articulate what they love or hate about a character because those same attributes show up in real people in the world, people our students may have to deal with or can choose to avoid. Understanding characters is preparation for life.

2. Zoom in on beautiful moments of language.

In a book as big and sometimes baggy as Bleak House, it was those lightning strike passages of language that kept me going. Being invited to read it slowly, as its original readers encountered it, gave me time to chew on any key line.

In the classroom, have used “key line pies” for years now. It’s a simple (and punny) graphic organizer with a six-slice pie chart and an empty rectangle in the middle. In the rectangle, students write a quote that made them stop and think. In each slice, they offer a different observation, interpretation, or question based on the quote. Slices five and six are tough, but the organizer pushes students to slow down and handwrite what they are thinking about and understand that great lines can evoke more than a narrow, straight-line thought.

We weren’t using graphic organizers, but this was exactly the kind of thinking our reading group was doing as we pulled out favorite lines.

Here’s just one I loved: “Impassive, as behooves its high breeding, the Dedlock town-house stares at the other houses in the street of dismal grandeur, and gives no outward sign of anything going wrong within” (Dickens 856).

They just don’t make sentences like that anymore. And as you can guess, something is wrong within the Dedlock house, but you’ll have to read the book if you want to know what it is. By this point in the novel, any reader could find six slices of meaning in this key line.

3. Ask students to draw lines between novels and the world.

It’s no news to teachers that relevance is essential to good teaching. Kids deserve to know why they should learn what we teach.

A few simple questions can help us draw out real-world relevance in class discussion of a book:

• What aspects of this novel remind you of something in our world today?

• What problems concern the author of this novel, and where are we at with those problems as a culture right now?

• If character X lived today, how would he or she respond to Y? Prove it with a quote from the novel!

4. Build gratitude for a community of reading books.

Reading and reacting to a common text is a great way to know each other.

I never like to wait long in English class before starting a novel or novella because it builds a bond as we learn about each other’s tastes, values, and curiosities. Just as I was motivated to keep reading despite the challenge of this novel, students can be lifted into a text by engaged peers and thoughtful conversations in large and small groups.

Sometimes the social aspect of reading — students knowing they will get to share their ideas with people they care about — is what makes the work of reading a novel get done.

A New School Year Full of Books

The school year, full of books, awaits. I see my AP Literature students for the first time on Tuesday. And while I won’t be assigning Bleak House, just shy of 1000 pages, as a whole-class novel for the course, I want to remember what I learned from feeling humbled and enthralled and frustrated and intrigued and gobsmacked in a long, meticulous reading of a really good book.

I want my students to miss living in each book we read together when it ends.

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This summer, I was fortunate enough to discover this gem from 2025: Dear Acorn (Love Oak) by Joyce Sidman.

This is simply a beautiful, beautiful book.

The poems are letters, arranged in pairs, written from tiny things to larger things and vice versa. Often these things share a “part/whole” relationship. An acorn writes to an oak tree, and the oak tree writes back. A cloud writes to water droplets, and the droplets respond on the next page.

This book reminds me of a truth I’ve discovered after 13 years of starting secondary English classes with a Poem of the Day that I’ll exclaim here: Children’s poems are for teenagers too!

If you are familiar with my book Poetry Pauses, you know that I start each year’s Poem of the Day routine with Shel Silverstein’s poem “Invitation,” from the start of the collection Where the Sidewalk Ends.

I ask my students, “What do you notice now in this poem that you would not have noticed back in third grade when you first read this poet?” Structure, punctuation, rhythm, allusion, a list with a few curious items all come up in our conversation. There are no wrong answers!

Every poem, or pair of poems, in this book, could invite similarly rich conversation.

Here are several reasons why your middle and high school students will love and learn from these children’s poems.

• While the packaging suggests an elementary school audience is intended for this book, there is complexity in each of these poems: assonance, metaphor, personification, irony. All the things we want our older students to notice and do as readers and writers are present.

• Older readers need tougher poems to keep growing, but they also need reminders that poems can be disarming and entertaining to read.

• Teenagers need reminders that they loved tuning in to sounds of words, rhythm and rhyme, as younger readers; that joy still lives within them.

• Pairing beautiful illustrations (and I’ve never met a Melissa Sweet book I haven’t liked) with poems opens discussion about the artist’s choices with older students, particularly those interested in creating their own artwork.

Let’s remember that while teenagers often hide behind a disaffected exterior, they too are children. Sometimes with the right stimulus, such as these poems filled with joy and wonder, nostalgia kicks in. They start talking. They start smiling. They start creating in their notebooks.

They feel like kids again while they are learning.

I could see this book useful in several ways in secondary classrooms:

• A mentor text for creative writing: Write a letter from a part to a whole, a tiny thing to a ginormous thing. The book even includes an author’s note with a plan for this on the last page!

• A spark for analytical “zooming in”: What is an important piece of the whole that we haven’t talked about in our novel yet? A critical moment, an object, a minor character: Give that piece a voice and write a letter from its point of view to something else in the book.

• An extension for the study of tone: Go outdoors as a class and zoom in close on something small and then zoom out to something broad and big. Find a topic in the outdoors and write a letter to it in the informal, friendly, inquisitive tone these poems use.

• An opening to memoir writing: This book is about relationships, and personification makes those relationships in nature feel very human. Write about a relationship in your life you have never written about before. What makes it so meaningful?

• An introduction to epistolary writing: In AP Lit we will talk about why authors might embed letters in narratives or poems. Let’s use this picture book as a quick, friendly introduction to get us thinking about why writers use this technique.

I am excited to have a new addition to a growing list of children’s poetry collections that will appeal to teenagers. Pictured below are a few other favorites of mine that you might want to check out.

Links in this post do earn a small commission. Of course, I always encourage you to buy books through your local bookshop if possible😊

Keep reading, keep writing, and keep smiling. Enjoy your summer!

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We expect students will hand in their own work. If there is a delay or reason to turn it in late, we expect honest communication about that need. The student will not copy someone else’s work, peek off someone else’s test, or submit work they copy and pasted from generative AI.

These are the expectations we review in the first week of a class. Students receive consequences when they cross those boundaries, and they should.

But what happens when we ask for more honesty than that behavioral baseline? What happens when we get kids candidly talking about their school experiences, confessing their choices anonymously, and asking us about the reasons for the way things are in school?

This happened, in planned and unplanned ways, this week in my classes. With just a few more weeks to go here in PA, we are at the point in the year where my students, even those in short elective classes like Creative Writing and Debate, feel comfortable, trusting, and sometimes outspoken. It’s a time of year to get them at their honest best, to reflect and learn from their observations about school, and start toying with ideas for next year.

Here are the ways I asked for honesty in my classes this week. I think each one is scalable and easily transfers to other classrooms, and you’re probably already doing more than one of these. Let me know what you think of these practices in the comments.

1. Collecting first-page drafts + AI transparency surveys.

This year, in my tenth grade English classes, all major assignments had two physical components to turn in the day a major essay was due, even though students uploaded their final copy of the essay for grading on our LMS.

Back at the start of our essay writing, we had taken time to brainstorm, talk with peers, and craft a thesis statement, followed by one, solid, 83-minute block of writing time. The expectation was not to finish a timed essay, but rather to leave the room with a solid start to an essay on paper, purely from the student’s brain, so that no one would need to proceed with the blinking cursor on a blank document when they got home.

I collect this handwritten work on turn-in day.

Since my classes have been involved in a pilot program at my school with student-facing AI access, and like adults they have a range of thoughts and feelings on it, I also give them an AI transparency survey at the start of each project. I’ve written a lot about this in The Important Work and on Edutopia, but for now it’s important to me that students have given substantial thought to the various meanings of “use AI” and make decisions accordingly. I want them to be honest about those choices.

This transparency survey needs to be stapled to their paper draft work and turned in to me on the same day that they upload their essays to our LMS for a grade.

So far, this is cutting down dramatically on AI cheating, and I notice students are judicious about any AI use because they know they’ll have to write about it. Many choose to abstain from AI and share that in the survey.

More Resources for AI in English Class

2. Conferring with my Creative Writing students.

How sad it would be to take an elective class in Creative Writing and turn in dishonest work, but in the age of AI, that temptation exists for time-crunched students.

Conferring with students, seeing their works in progress, spotlighting the moments where their voice shines, and providing mini-lessons each day across a full week of revision process has helped me feel like I know each student’s voice well in our fiction writing unit.

Nothing about conferring with writers is new or revolutionary. I include it in this list as a reminder that old ways can have new value as technology changes and trends shift across the arc of a career. Conferring during a writer’s process always feels better than questioning a writer’s honesty after submission.

3. Discussing formative assessments with my Debate students.

I’m rarely a teacher who veers far, far from the plan, but students in my Debate class got me into a bit of a live debate about whether formative work is “worth it” to complete when it has little or no impact on their marking period grade. (In our school, the norm is that formative work can count for 10% of the marking period grade.)

“But how will you perform well on game day without attending any of the practices?” I ask.

“If I get good grades on the tests but skip all the formative work, what does it matter?” one student, who graduates this year and intends to be a teacher, countered.

This sparked some really honest conversation about a few important questions that affect their lives:

• What is the inherent value (or not) of homework?

• What do teachers do that helps or hurts student learning and motivation?

• What happens when formative work is not at the appropriate level for all students in the room?

• How do we define “teaching?” How do we define “learning?”

• What makes you want to complete the formative practice or skip completing it?

• Do schools do a good job of teaching students how to study and how to learn?

This class discussion could be its own post, but you get the point. It might not have been a formal debate day, but the truth bombs were dropping. And we all learned from them.

4. A two-question, Yes/No survey in English class . . . with a twist!

Everyone in my Honors 10 English class had an identical, tiny slip of paper. “I’ll turn my back,” I said. “Draw a line down the middle of your slip of paper, and make sure no one sees your answers. Keep your handwriting simple, so I can’t tell who writes this, because I want this survey to be completely anonymous.”

The room fell silent. They could tell this survey was going to matter to me.

“On the left side of the line, answer this question with Yes or No: I have knowingly cheated using AI in this class. On the right side of the line, Yes or No: I have knowingly cheated using AI in other classes.”

“Make sure you shuffle them,” my students told me as I collected the slips of paper, face down. “We don’t want you counting them somehow and figuring this out!” The honesty in the air was palpable now, and the expectation cut both ways!

Before I reveal the reveal the numbers, I’ll confess, I had a hidden objective here.

This was Day 1 of our final unit, and the next day we would start reading The Crucible. The plan was to pretend to look through the results impassively, then say with great gravitas, “Class, there is only one person in the room who wrote Yes/Yes. Now . . . who do you think it is?” and start a little two-minute witch hunt simulation.

About sixty seconds into our simulation, one student, in John Proctor style, crowed, “But wasn’t this supposed to be an anonymous survey?” And guess what . . . a whole bunch of students started accusing him of being our AI cheater!

(In an ironic double-twist, I actually did have only one “Yes/Yes” in the survey results!)

But once I revealed this was all just a little taste of what they would see of human nature at the start of The Crucible, I told them that I would never tell the class the real numbers from the survey, for I too was honest: Students had trusted me with that information, not their peers.

When I sat down to look at the results after class, I found that beside my one “Yes/Yes,” I also had zero “Yes/No” answers, nine “No/No” answers (one added, “Because AI is stupid and I hate it”), and fifteen “No/Yes” answers.

How honest are these? I’ll never know for sure.

What did I learn? There is a fairly large group of students who will knowingly cheat on school assignments but tell me they are not cheating with AI in English class.

What do I want to know now?

• How does this connect with the conversation I had in debate class about the purpose of formative work, challenge, and the value of learning-to-learn?

• How does this connect with conferring about writing, giving attention to in-progress work?

• How does this connect to my willingness to talk about AI with nuance and expect students to be thoughtful decision makers instead of lockstep followers of my mindset on the matter?

I suspect that points 1-3 are all tangled up in point 4, and that gives me a lot to sit with.

Most of all, these experiences this week help my focus to remain on nurturing healthy responses to changing times rather than latching onto those painful stories of students who use AI to cheat with abandon. Those stories are true too. But they are not the single story that should define our view of students or the broader world’s view of teenagers.

So what happens when we ask for honesty?

We and our students get thinking.

And that’s a good thing!

But reading helps teachers for all the reasons it helps our students. It nourishes intellectual growth, provides escape into other worlds, explores topics at depths we’ve never considered, makes us ask questions we never knew we had. In work that demands incessant giving, reading books is a way of giving back to ourselves.

And yet . . . we’re tired. And it’s May. Much like our students, the lure of scrolling can be irresistible as our limited time with some peace and quiet slips over the dam in a noisy waterfall of images, clips, and sentence fragments.

When I recently cooked up the plan with fellow English teacher, Marcus Luther, to read Charles Dickens’ Victorian novel, Bleak House, it seemed intimidating. My Penguin edition, with a cover from the much-loved 2005 BBC miniseries based on the novel, is 989 pages long. This may be the longest book I’ve ever read.

But Marcus reminded me: Dickens published his novels as serials, and this original came to readers in nineteen parts. He suggested a slow read from April to August, dividing the book into these original segments. Suddenly, this became like a season of a TV show to experience, one episode after another and just a bit of weekly discipline to make it happen.

Marcus and I knew we would both read this book, but we wanted to open the call to other teacher-readers, thinking that maybe a few would join us. Almost forty did, and among them, people from five continents, people who are on their third reading of this novel, and people who have never read any of Dickens’ work before.

Each week, we have a Google Doc where we share thoughts on a simple table, bulleting lists of responses to each other, and on average, we generate almost 10K words of response to our few chapters of reading each week. Not everyone jumps into the conversation each week. That’s life, and that’s OK. We are busy teachers, and we are reading something big and challenging together.

I find my own reading life moves in seasons. Sometimes I’m voracious, other times less engaged, and that’s OK too. I’ve come to appreciate that is part of being a real-life reader. But if you are in a season where book reading is not part of your routine right now, here are two top-of-mind lists:

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Why Teachers Should Read:

1. We deserve an escape from reality.

2. Our brains need some reading that is not crafted by our students.

3. Challenging books make students of us again. We can identify the strategies that help us latch on to tough text and credibly talk about our experience in the classroom.

4. Unchallenging books can help us experience a sort of “reader’s runner’s high” as we keep those pages turning. Bring on the genres!

5. Professional books help us feel empowered and less alone in our work, inspired by other skilled and compassionate teachers.

6. We all need help training our own twenty-first-century attention spans.

7. Connecting with other readers, live or virtually, expands the way we think about any book.

8. Books call us to remember what’s at the heart of our teaching, why we do what we do in the classroom each day.

How Teachers Can Keep Reading

1. Take a big book in tiny chunks. There are some great long books with short chapters out there – I’m looking at you Anthony Doerr!

2. Find someone to read a book at the same time as you are and chat or text about it.

3. Use your local library or libro.fm (which supports your local bookstore and always has a good sale selection) to listen to audiobooks. It’s not cheating!

4. Find a novel-in-verse written for teens or a graphic novel or memoir that gets you moving cover-to-cover quickly. I’ve blasted away the cobwebs of a reading lull many times this way.

5. Read aloud to your own children. It’s OK to choose a novel they couldn’t read themselves. My mom read us Great Expectations as we fell asleep as late-elementary-aged kids . . . maybe that’s why I’m drawn to Bleak House today!

6. Add a line about what book you are currently reading to the signature line of your email. You’ll be amazed at the conversation it sparks!

7. Think of an author you loved years ago but haven’t had time for lately. Pick up something you haven’t read yet by that author.

8. Pop by a bookstore and let the stacks guide you to your next read. The poetry displays at The Strand in New York City (see below) and at Book Moon in Easthampton, Massachusetts both provoked impulse buys on my travels last month.

9. Plan with a few colleagues to read a professional book together, one chapter at a time, and informally chat through what strategies seem like they would work in your school.

Our work is exhausting and fruitful and frustrating and wild.

On stormy seas, books provide ballast.

If you’re in a reading slump right now, try to find something that re-ignites your own love of books. And if you’re reading something great right now, drop it in the comments and tell others about it – we’d love to join you!

Truly, poetry still gets a bad rap for being taught so poorly for many, many years, treated either as something mysterious, untouchable, and sacrosanct or as some kind of specimen, steeped in formaldehyde, pinned to a tray, and ready for thorough dissection.

Through the hard work and support of The Poetry Foundation and several major publishers during National Poetry Month each year, this perception is changing. Add to this the more recent movement to #TeachLivingPoets in high school, the viral clips of spoken word poetry on social media, and the power of poetry to work with our waning attention spans and our need for solace and connection (see “Everything Is Going To Be All Right” by Derek Mahon or “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limon). . . by some measures, poetry continues to rise.

It should!

If April is the only time that poetry gets the spotlight in your classroom, I challenge you to think beyond this monthlong celebration and consider other ways poetry can engage students and unlock additional meaning in all the reading and writing you do in class.

Poetry More Often

Readers of my recent book Poetry Pauses already know that I’m a big believer in the power poetry has to amplify the lessons of any writing skills we want our students to develop, from analysis, to argument, to narrative, to research.

I am in my thirteenth year starting each class I teach with a poem of the day. Some days we do this just for the joy of sharing beautifully worded ideas. Sometimes we use this routine to rehearse a recent skill with some retrieval practice. Sometimes we practice visualization or oral reading skills. Other times we borrow a line from the poem or something about its structure to inspire our own poems in our writer’s notebooks.

Many times, we link something we notice in a poem to a writing skill we are applying in a bigger project. I ask questions like this:

· How does this poem make a claim and then build an argument with supporting details?

· How does this poem use detailed imagery to bring to life a setting like we are trying to do in our narratives?

· How does this poem frame a surprising fact from the poet’s research to engage readers and make us think?

This routine only takes a few minutes and it’s the one thing that wins over every student by the end of the course. I say that without hyperbole: “I miss the Poem of the Day!” is a refrain I hear from former students when I pass them in the hallway, over and over and over again, year after year.

Often, I give students these links to keep them reading daily poetry, delivered to their inbox. I offer these links to teachers too when they ask me, “Where do you find all the poems?” When we become readers of poetry, we go on to find all kinds of connections to the things we teach. It’s an (amazing) occupational hazard of being a teacher.

· Poem-a-Day | Academy of American Poets

· Poem of the Day | The Poetry Foundation

· The Slowdown | The Slowdown

Of course, a poem a day in class is a lot. Way more than a monthly celebration. If it sounds like an overwhelming amount of poetry, I get it.

What about trying a Poem of the Week? I know some teachers are successful with a Poetry Friday routine, starting each Friday class period with a poem.

What about coming back to some work with poetry that you already do with poetry during April and building on that foundation in May and June with a second poem by the same poet or a poem that connects thematically to the novel you are studying to end the school year?

What about finding a few poems to integrate into units you already teach? Because poems are short, they give us the chance to practice a skill more often within a unit, running laps with the skill, so to speak. I guarantee that both your original unit AND your perception of poetry and what it can do will change for the better!

Lessons for Class

Here are a few poems I use for writing units that you might find useful too. Full lessons and elaborations, the whys and wherefores, are all available in my book and its related online resources. For each idea below, I cite the page in Poetry Pauses where you can learn more and see an entire lesson, but the seeds here should be enough to get you up and running!

1. Brainstorming for an upcoming paper? Read Brian Bilston’s “An Attempt to Write an Abecedarian Poem in Praise of the Dictionary,” and invite students to write an abecedarian poem about their topic as part of the brainstorming process. Conferring, tease out lines and ideas that might be worthy of expansion in an essay. See pages 26-31.

2. Writing character analysis? Try the short poem “Sisters” by Janet Wong as a model for students to write about the contrast between two characters in a novel using figurative language to express their observations. Figurative language gives us fresh angles to explore in analysis writing. See pages 46-47.

3. Writing a narrative and need students to add more imagery? Try “Wooden Church” by Charles Simic. Have students sketch a four-frame comic that turns key imagery from the poem into visual images. Next, students can sketch the four frames of visual details they want a reader to remember from their narrative writing before they get back to drafting and bringing those images to life in words. Strong imagery starts with strong imagination. See pages 68-70.

4. Writing research papers? Study how scientist Dr. Amy Boyd in “Altered Axis” makes facts about how trees decay in the forest come to life with vivid language that draws a reader into her own fascination with the topic. By the way, the entire journal Concilience, models how scientific facts can be expressed and explored through poetry. It’s a wonderful resource. See pages 104-108.

5. Studying the power of parallel structure and anaphora? Check out Alex Dimitrov’s poem “Love” or Joy Harjo’s poem “Remember” and have students practice this skill in poetry before transferring it to their essays. See pages 130-133.

My work comes from my middle and later high school classrooms, but two excellent books are out there for elementary teachers to use poetry with analogous methods for younger: Poems Are Teachers by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater and Awakening the Heart, Second Edition by Georgia Heard.

In the comments, let me know your thoughts on favorite activities for National Poetry Month AND favorite activities to integrate poems the rest of the year. Let’s get this beautiful genre in front of our students more often and work with it in ways that lifts all of their written work with more poetic expression.

Transparency Statement: This post is human-crafted with no use of artificial intelligence. A small portion of the purchase price through Amazon links included here support the work I do on this Substack. Any orders through corwin.com can use the code SAVE20 to save 20% and get free shipping within the USA.

And if you didn’t hear the theme song running through your head with this title, do yourself a favor, click here, listen, and get it stuck in your head. I’ll wait.

When I was in seventh grade, we had a year-long course in Geography, separate from our World History class. Armed with the knowledge I’d acquired from studying maps in that class, I felt sure that if I were on the show, running around the studio floor labeling obscure countries, I could win.

Things have changed.

Recently, after reading a poem in AP Literature class about September 11^th, my students took a tiny formative quiz on their LMS. The last question was a hotspot question: “Drop a pin on the setting of this poem.”

My students knew September 11^th happened in New York City. They live under two hours from Manhattan, and almost all of them have been there.

But when it came time to pinpoint NYC on a map . . . most of them ended up somewhere in the Catskills. A few drifted to The Adirondacks. Almost no one got it right, and they were a little indignant that the hotspot did not include the whole state of New York.

I pushed back a little: “Can you name the five boroughs of New York City?” Most stopped after Brooklyn and the Bronx. One student knew that one borough began with an M but guessed “Massachusetts” instead of Manhattan . . . half joking . . . I think.

“Can you show me roughly where Los Angeles is?” Most could. “Chicago?” No one could.

Then I said, “Next week I’ll be in New Orleans for a few days at a conference for teachers. Do you know what state that’s in?”

“Is it Wisconsin?” one asked. “Colorado?” guessed another.

Yikes.

Mind you, these were students who compose literary analysis of complicated texts like nobody’s business. There was a fanned-open copy of Bloom’s Critical Views: Nathaniel Hawthorne sitting face-down on a nearby student desk.

I felt sad that somewhere in their education this gap had yawned opened. They had a fractured sense of how parts of the world they knew about and heard about and read about as settings in stories fit together in physical space.

Still, geography interests them. Games like Worldle (not to be confused with Wordle) and GeoGuessr are perennially popular and teach kids about places on Earth.

Perhaps it’s noteworthy: These particular students had their sixth-grade year truncated due to COVID-19, and a rough start to the first half of their seventh-grade year too. Is this where some map studying got displaced?

Or have those strapping, glossy, pull-down maps of yesteryear disappeared entirely from students’ elementary classrooms, replaced with songs that help students to memorize states and capitals with no attention their physical locations?

I am not making fun of students. And I am not waxing poetic about the past.

I am just feeling intrigued, inquisitive . . . interrogative.

What Can We Do?

What are some productive ways to build maps into things we do all the time in secondary schools?

I does not take much time, and I think it could help students better orient their study of literature on the physical globe.

Here are four ideas.

1. Create maps for settings in literature and poetry.

A simple handout with the USA on one side and the world on the other will give students a chance to map out the settings of all of the books they read in class. Tape it in the writer’s notebook or include it in the binder!

At the end of their AP Literature course, I always have students list every major literary work they have read in high school that might make a good fit for the open-ended question on the test. This year, instead of just listing titles and big ideas, I’m including a US and world map so they can pinpoint the settings of the major works too.

We can also keep a map on a bulletin board and drop pushpins as we finish independent reading books and class novels, as we come upon places named in poems.

2. Study current event maps for nonfiction articles.

Do you use an article of the week or current events reading routine as part of your class? Slow down on the maps embedded in the articles. Frame them in a larger world map. Consider context. What countries or bodies of water that sound familiar connect to and impact the places in the news that sound less familiar?

3. Zoom in with Google Maps

Are you studying a book where the setting is so important it almost becomes a character of its own? Or perhaps a place that shaped the author indelibly?

Use Google Maps to zoom out to find the context of a place. Then zoom in to see the details.

Sure, Romeo and Juliet’s Verona is in Italy. But where in Italy? Zoom out and -- surprise! – you’ll find it’s closer to Switzerland and Austria than to Naples, the birthplace of pizza. Zoom in to see the major geographical landmarks, like the Casa di Giulietta, said to have inspired Shakespeare. One more click, and you can see the balcony from street level.

What about Zora Neal Hurston’s Eatonville? It’s one thing to read about it Their Eyes Were Watching God, but what about finding it on a map and relating it geographically to the places in Florida where your students have traveled. Can the class trace Janie’s physical journey through Florida on a map as you read?

4. Map the class’s personal memoirs

When it comes to writing personal narratives of memoirs, many students like to write about the high drama of their travel experiences. What if we place a map on a bulletin board and have students pin the locations of these personal memories for the class to see?

These boards always draw my attention when I visit a funky coffee shop or ice cream place on my travels. Let the visual appeal bait your students to learn a little bit about the geography of their own life stories as they write.

Small Adjustments

One thing you’ll notice as a throughline in these ideas: simplicity. They all take just a few quick minutes.

As Vincent van Gogh once wrote, “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”

With a series of small things brought together, we can impact a great thing: the way our students understand the planet.

Many have pointed out that the advent of AI spotlights existing weaknesses in educational norms, so as we consider how and when to thoughtfully integrate AI—and how to prevent it from robbing us of opportunities to think—let’s consider a triangular foundation of imperatives to work on consistently, no matter our teaching circumstances or opinions on artificial intelligence. (And yes, those em dashes are mine. This post is human-crafted with one AI-generated image.)

We can work on these within the classroom, the department, the district, and the system. These three actions empower us and afford each of us agency for whatever is ahead.

Pinpoint the Epicenters of Critical Thinking

Excellent teachers who rail against the intrusion of AI in school often cite critical thinking as the most at-risk skill in the classroom. I agree.

But the more arguments I hear about endangered critical thinking, the more I think we easily inflate our perceptions of how much critical thinking goes on any given day, even in effective classrooms.

The five-paragraph essay and the textbook activity and the standardized test prep drill are sure not inviting it. And even in classrooms that do not center these types of things, some days are about building knowledge or practicing a skill.

So what if each teacher, with course-alike colleagues, takes some time to identify where they feel the epicenters of critical thinking exist in their current courses and practices. Then ask two questions:

1. Do we need to keep AI out of the mix to protect and preserve critical thinking that is purely human in this learning activity?

Or . . .

2. Can we invite AI into the mix to provoke and expand critical thinking in this learning activity?

The answers to those two questions will likely vary based on the nature and objective of the activity, as well as how the particular teacher employs their well-honed art of teaching in the classroom.

Engaging students in thinking or notebook writing about how or why AI would endanger or enhance critical thinking for a particular experience or unit or course is also a valuable exercise in thinking critically about artificial intelligence – a skill we should all be developing.

Make School Less Transactional

When students (and parents, if we’re being honest) see school only in terms of grades and GPA, they shortchange themselves of the deeper value of learning and becoming a well-educated person.

This has been problematic long before AI entered the scene. It’s just cringingly apparent right now.

A student who worships grades will be much more likely to sacrifice their own integrity on the altar of points whether that means peeking off a neighbor’s exam or having a chatbot compose the essay or empowering an AI agent to take a quiz for them on an LMS.

Report cards are not receipts.

Graduation ceremonies are not checkout counters.

Learning is an endeavor filled with frustration and with joy.

Do we talk about all of this with kids? Does our storytelling embed these truths? Do we help students weigh how they value grades against how they value learning?

We always should have been, but we need this now more than ever.

Changing the grading system becomes more urgent when the traditional numbers-and-letters currency of the school makes friction and struggle in our learning seem too risky.

But even teachers like me, working within a traditional grading system, have power to shift value away from numbers in several ways:

• Embed feedback loops on formative work in our daily practice; make sure that most feedback comes during, not at the end, of a project.

• Allow students to “pitch” grades on some aspects of their graded work, synthesizing and articulating the evidence to support their pitch.

• Weed out gradebook items that are based on compliance or conformity and are not evidence of student skill development and/or mastery of skills.

• Afford opportunities for learning that are driven by student curiosity and not tied to grades at all.

Talk About Productive Struggle and Attention Span

If your doctor sees numbers they don’t like in your blood test results, we don’t expect them to click their tongues sadly and say, “Wow, I don’t like these numbers,” and walk away in judgmental forfeit. We expect clear, professional advice about what we can do to correct course.

But sometimes, venting in the teacher’s lounge, all we do is wag our heads in chagrin and talk behind our students’ backs about their phone addictions and lax attention spans.

To be fair, not much professional development has equipped us to give kids strategies to change these trajectories, and while laws banning cell phones at school send a message, they don’t fundamentally shift a cultural trend that devalues and erodes our sustained attention.

But what if we bring it up more often?

Teachers are good storytellers.

• Can we embed stories of how productive struggle and sustained attention has been meaningful in our own lives and skill development, linking it to the content we teach?

• Can we link these skills to something we love outside of school: hunting, woodworking, crocheting, hiking, Disney vacation planning?

• Can we emphasize these qualities as we study characters and scientists and historical figures across the curriculum? How do their productive struggles and sustained attention pay off?

As adults living in the twenty-first century, we probably struggle with attention span issues as well. What are we doing about it?

• Can we model what it means to be responsive to the bad habits we might see developing in ourselves?

• Can we talk about what we do when we find ourselves too addicted to technology?

• Can we invite students to write reflections or action plans or solutions they have researched that directly address their attention spans?

Forward momentum in developing skills we want our students to value fosters more optimism than decrying the skills they have not yet developed. And some of those skills are more fundamental than they used to be, even for teenagers: working through a tough spot, paying attention to little things.

Check out these articles about how to help kids value productive struggle and extend their attention spans and manage distraction.

It Is Never Just About AI

I write about artificial intelligence and how to approach it with balance, reflection, and cautious care, working to make sure it pushes rather than evades thinking.

But none of these matters (or works very well) if we are not simultaneously working to strengthen this triangle of skills to support good human thinking, which will serve students well in any classroom and in life, in pursuits that are both analog and digital and some hybrid of the two.

All of us, no matter what our personal stance on artificial intelligence, can work on the foundational weaknesses artificial intelligence exposed in school, not simply what to do about artificial intelligence.

Let’s strengthen this triangle.

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It begins.

There it is: the first sentence. Written. In bold.

A simple, two-word, declarative sentence can set into motion something meaningful, worthwhile, connected, and energizing.

I hope that this new Substack will be all of those things.

Our Focus Here

This will be a newsletter about teaching and learning, about literacy and thinking and poetry and artificial intelligence and curiosity. With a list like that, you know it craves some order, some structure.

A Word on the Title

The title I’ve chosen may be a bit puzzling -- Declarative, Imperative, Interrogative, Explanatory – but it provides a structure for what’s to come.

Sharp-eyed grammarians know that these are the four primary types of sentences we can write, the foundation of anything we put into words. Without these four basic structures, our words would be unorganized space junk with no gravity or orbit, but with them, we can create great things. And terrible things. And “mid” things, as the kids like to say.

I hope that this Substack will be one of the great things.

The title not only highlights the rich variety of expression even simple structures provide, but it also serves as a categorization strategy for each of my missives to the world of educators, thinkers, readers, and writers.

The first sentence of each post will always appear in bold font (see above) and will fall into one of these four categories, which then go on to define the post.

· Declarative posts: Reflective, philosophical, explanatory

· Imperative posts: Opinionated, action-oriented, visionary

· Interrogative posts: Inquisitive, persistent, exploratory

· Exclamatory posts: Excited, inviting, celebratory

Today’s post is declarative. It sets the stage.

A Bit About Me

Allow me to introduce myself.

I’m Brett Vogelsinger, an English teacher, author, and public speaker who has been working with students in the classroom for 23 years.

The first two decades, I worked in a 7-9 middle school building in the suburbs outside Philadelphia, PA. I teach in Bucks County, to be precise, home of Dorothy Parker and Oscar Hammerstein II and Margaret Mead and James Michener. And my student writers.

For the past three years, I’ve worked in a 10-12 high school, soon to become a 9-12 high school in a major realignment project in my school district.

I currently teach 10^th Grade English, AP Literature and Composition, Creative Writing and Debate.

I am in my 13^th year of starting each day of English class with a Poem of the Day. That habit led me to a collaborative blogging project and later to Poetry Pauses, a book about how engaging with poetry can help students strengthen their writing in any genre.

With the advent of artificial intelligence, I developed an interest in how to protect the writing skills students need to develop. I also wanted to explore the difference between artificial intelligence use that pushes our thinking and use that hijacks it. This led to my second book, Artful AI in Writing Instruction.

In all of my work and my writing, I strive to stay grounded in the realities I work with each day in my classroom. I write with the humble recognition that schools and classrooms around the country and the world can be so different from each other. I hope that balance shows as I share ideas and inspirations, questions and opinions and musings.

I also deeply value conversation, and I hope you will connect with me whether through comments, social media interactions, or email.

I stock a lot of resources on my website too, so I hope that will be a page to tag on your favorites bar and visit often.

Finally, I hope you will find things here worth sharing.

An Invitation

Is there someone you think would enjoy this journey from the start? Please forward this newsletter to them and encourage them to join the mailing list.

Our work as educators is declarative, imperative, interrogative, and exclamatory, depending on the situation, the place, and the day.

The next post is already in the works. It begins with an imperative sentence and will arrive soon.

Let’s begin – together!

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