It is my guess that other teachers would have one of two reactions to this passage: 

1. Rabble rabble rabble grammar
2. Wow. This kid is really struggling with both the structure of school, which they compare to a prison, and the academic content in a class that “gives a lot of work, even after tests.” 

As I realized this, I felt I needed to write and share this moment-- which clarified the “missing the forest for the trees” theories of education I hear from so many teachers. If you have this kid in your class, or one like them, please take a moment to just listen to them. 

Listen to what they are saying. Please don’t get so caught up in grammar and MLA guidebooks and double spacings and Times New Romans that you don’t hear what they are saying: 

• School feels like a prison to me.
• Trying to learn something that is way beyond my skill level is (boring, frustrating, annoying). Please listen to me.

This semester, I’m teaching a Film and Literature class for the second time. The first time through, in the Fall of 2015, I taught it as more of a filmmaking class, and while we still have some of those elements this semester, I have incorporated more purely literary content. 

This is how I’ve done it. 

And full disclosure: as with everything I do in class, this idea was stolen entirely from Cheryl, and then modified for my own class context, in which we are explicitly supposed to be comparing the film versions of stories to the novel/play versions. She does a Pokemon Go-style search for literary references with her 7th graders that is incredible and engaging and massively fruitful for kids’ education and cultural literacy. 

I have picked a tentative, ever-expanding and changing list of cultural reference texts that kids (who were almost all born after 2000!) probably wouldn’t encounter, or choose to engage with even if they did. The criteria: there has to be some sort of written (non-script, novel-style or play/short story-style) version and a film version in existence. And for NC high schools’ sake, the film version has to be rated PG-13 or lower. These criteria eliminate cultural touchstones like Catcher in the Rye (Salinger won’t sell the rights to make a movie version) and rated-R movie classics like Beloved or The Godfather.  

This semester, kids will be encountering classics like Hound of the Baskervilles, Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Scarlet Letter, Dracula, Moby Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Gone With the Wind, along with probably a half-dozen others that have yet to be decided. 

[As an aside, I do realize that this list skews both old and white, and that’s something I’m struggling with rectifying. I selected texts that probably wouldn’t get read even if they were assigned--ones that would come off as both oppressively long and complex. But as I said before, this list is in constant flux, and I welcome suggestions to both improve it and make it more culturally diverse.]

The goal here is not to give kids a deep understanding of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s diction or whatever. The goal is to do one or two of these a week, so kids will understand common cultural references, like Greg House = Sherlock, or what a “scarlet A” is, or what it means for someone to be chasing their own great white whale, or that Nicholas Sparks stole every idea he ever had from Jane Austen. 

So: here’s what we do. 

The first day, I have students fill out a slideshow that asks them to summarize the plot of the story in 2 sentences and make a slide each for 10 characters, describing them and their significance to the story, and inserting an image of each. They are encouraged to use sites like Shmoop and SparkNotes for this process -- the only goal is that they get some context for the excerpts they are about to encounter…

Which generally happens on Day 2. I pick an important scene from the text/movie (often, but not always, the opening scene), and link up the assignment on Google Classroom to a 5-8 minute video clip from the movie and the corresponding scene from the novel. (This is one of the other reasons I have gone for older texts - they are easy to find full-texts versions of online, often from Project Gutenberg.) Students read/view the two, and write some comparisons, look for patterns that repeat, consider what the movie adds/leaves out, etc.  For some of the texts, I’ll give them two video versions; for example, for Pride and Prejudice, I gave them a clip of the 1995 BBC miniseries and the first two episodes of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. 

The next assignment is to look for pop culture references and make a slide deck of 20 that they find (Bride and Prejudice, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, etc.). I want them to understand that these stories don’t exist in isolation; rather, many of them are referenced in many ways in modern media. Then, I ask them to do a second comparison between a scene of their choosing in the book and the same in the movie. 

Hopefully, this series of assignments gives students a collection of cultural checkpoints that they would otherwise miss in their educations. As we move forward in the semester, the assignments will likely get more complex; I will start to add things like “compare the way the author chooses to establish setting to the way the director does the same in this scene” and “how would you film this scene in this book, if you were directing, and then compare that to how it was done” and “shoot this scene from the book yourself.”  

What I have noticed already, though, is that students are continuing to engage with the stories beyond the required assignments. They are watching the rest of the BBC Sherlock episodes; they are checking out Sherlock Holmes anthologies from the library; they are watching all 100 episodes of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. And that is definitely a success in my book. 

I had a former student come by and tell me today that she wished she could come back and take my class again, because it seemed so much cooler now than it did when she took it. 

And she's right. It is a way better class than when she took it. My first year at this school, I taught Desktop Publishing with a little "How to Make a Good Powerpoint" and a little "Advertising 101."  This semester, Desktop Publishing includes sections on coding (block and html, if the kids want to get into that), graphic design/layout, Photoshop, making good slideshows across several platforms, manipulating all of the Google Drive suite of apps, movie making, website building, and creating a huge portfolio of their work. Then, they leverage these skills in bids for real-world projects, like an online literary magazine or a newsletter template for another school. 

It's important to iterate our classes, and it's important to learn to teach in more varied and effective ways. Sometimes, though, we lose sight of the real-world application of that idea. Iteration isn't just another one of those buzzwords we should hear and let float through on the ether. 

Real iteration is taking a class that was about how to make a calendar in MS Publisher when I was hired here and turning it into a Real-World Digital Skills Wonderland. It's about making the class more useful for everyone, and giving students skills they can use across the curriculum and after they leave my class. And it's about modeling the hidden curriculum in my class for my students; it's about always looking for ways to improve. 

This has to be said again. It's kind of important. 

If you want to have respectful relationships with the teenagers in your classroom, here are some ways to achieve optimal success:

1. Treat them like people. 

That's the whole list. High school students are people-- sometimes more impulsive, sometimes more raw, hopefully far less jaded, but people nonetheless. 

Talk to them like human beings, ones who can have good days and bad days, ones who can say inappropriate things sometimes, and ones who are just trying to figure everything out, just like everyone else. 

Let's not complicate things. 

I have lots of little tricks about how to build classroom community, but my favorite doesn't involve any technology at all (which probably surprises people).

I find that writing little notes to students on scraps of paper is one of the best ways to create an inviting, caring atmosphere in a classroom. None of them are super, super serious in content. Most, in fact, just say something like, "Hey, that logo you designed yesterday was pretty sweet." And then I add suggestions for revision if I want--but that usually doesn't happen. 

Other times, when a student isn't acting/responding normally, I'll give them a short note that says something to the effect of, "Hey, you seem a little off today. Hope whatever it is improves soon." 

These two types of notes, generally sorted into "You're awesome" types and "Are you ok?" types, make a huge difference in classroom community. I see them stuck into binder covers, and former students tell me they keep them for years. 

It just goes back to my bedrock thesis of education: treat students like they are people, because, you know, they are people.  Notes that just say, "Dude, I see you, your humanity, and your value" carry huge, huge amounts of weight in building the kind of environment we enjoy and can learn in.