I had a student ask me once how I could answer so many questions about Romeo and Juliet so quickly. I told him it's a lot easier when you've read or watched it 40 times.

It's a position that has evolved over the course of my career. Rookie me would have absolutely voted for 3+.

While I'm an English major and love literature, every part of me now believes that our first responsibility is to prepare students for the literacy landscape of 2025 and beyond.

There are many traditional practices in English classrooms that I *wish* teachers would reevaluate. If there's learning in Shakespeare that can't be achieved in any other way, then go for it. If there are more current, relevant, and engaging ways to achieve the same ends, why not use them? 5/5

And by no means am I maligning Parasite - it's a movie that deals with love, struggle, greed, power, ignorance, and inequality. These are issues every bit as universal as anything Shakespeare wrote about. Why then a month for Shakespeare but Bong Joon Ho would instead likely be dismissed? 4/5

And I've seen multiple mentions of keeping these units to a month. I'll point out that these are ultimately scripts that are meant to be performed in 2.5 hours. If I said to colleagues that I'd be spending the next month in class reading the Parasite screenplay, they'd think I was crazy. 3/5

In my 25+ years of experience, I find that if I stop explaining (translating?) the play for students, they do not understand it, and this is true even when watching them. If we accept that teaching literacy skills and strategies is one of our core responsibilities, what are students learning? 2/5

For the 80%+ of people who are arguing for multiple Shakespeare plays, my recommendation is to remember that English is both a discipline AND a course that every student has to take. For those who will not be heading studying literature, what are they taking away from studying Shakespeare? 1/5

Very excited for the show tomorrow at the TD Music Hall!

There are so many great resources out there to help guide a shift to this approach, too. Maybe start with @biblioracle.bsky.social and @rebekahodell1.bsky.social and take it from there. 3/3

As well, I think we do kids a disservice with an over-reliance on templates and graphic organizers. Let's instead focus more on principles of effective communication, and use student-selected mentor texts to explore these principles. And then let kids write about topics that energize them. 2/3

I appreciate your thread here a lot. I sometimes wonder though, if we - English teachers collectively - don't often bring this grief upon ourselves. We too often traffic in literary analysis, where young writers are asked to compose in an impersonal tone, about content indifferent to them. 1/3

I've done something similar in the past using big rolls of brown craft paper and have students write the texts on the wall themselves. It creates a really satisfying graffiti effect. I found that students were respectful of the space, too, so I didn't have to deal with unwelcome contributions.

I walked by last week and thought of the episode. The location remains a Spirit Halloween. Shocking, somehow, that a spot you'd think might be coveted real estate remains unused for most of the year.

(And, I'm really looking forward to The Debaters show in Oshawa on the 16th.)

My best quarterbacking happens on Monday mornings.

Alas, Vladdy would never have hit in that situation. The Dodgers would have walked him to load the bases and instead pitched to IKF.