Not for everyone, obviously, but it feels like a privilege to me that I get to poke around my classroom tomorrow and hear whatever piqued the kids’ interest in our Huck reading.

So yes my 2 yr old did wear this dirty shirt to the Brooklyn book fest to accompany her editor mom to her booth, and yes we are planning her life for her

Hannah Sullivan on morning routines (her book “Three Poems” is really good!)

“James” will teach my kids more about how to position themselves thoughtfully and critically in conversation with canonized writers and thinkers. I can’t get over how interesting and useful this book is for teachers invested in teaching “the canon” in a way that makes it fresh/vital.

Dorothy Hale’s “The Novel and the New Ethics” is a good example of a lit studies book that would likely be of interest to HS English teachers—complicates/clarifies some of the arguments we make and hear about the ethical value of novel reading, and where that value comes from

One of the weird ironies of our time is that we have devised an overwhelming arsenal of precise tools to measure literacy while dispensing with conditions that allow literacy to be an experience that includes meaning-making, pleasure, or any kind of insight.

Watching this UN speech and sometimes I forget that Trump’s speaking style is basically “substitute teacher with an ax to grind.” “He talked at us the entire time,” the kids would report after this very strange man’s class.

Going to read this one with the seniors next week/talk about the ethics of doing something like chatting about a novel when it seems like we’ve got bigger fish to fry

Humanities profs: encourage your talented students to consider secondary ed. For someone who cares about reading and writing and believes these things change lives, the job gives you the strange/fascinating privilege of testing that hypothesis every day.

Kid with serious reading journal doodle skills

It’s the first day of fall, English teachers. Now is our time. Put on your sweaters, revel in reading in early dusk, assign spooky poems as we approach Halloween

Thinking about how one of the ways people tried to argue “Beloved” should be banned was that it is an “870L” Lexile Score and so too easy for high schoolers

Can we make another version of this white paper but include high school teachers in the convo next time? www.teaglefoundation.org/Teagle/media...

Thinking about HS/college distinctions: I don’t think people who don’t teach HS appreciate the extent to which our work includes caregiving. It’s what makes standardization so spooky—organizing school around test prep militates against caring for kids in ways that our job ought to entail.

Is interesting that arguably the most famous American novel has a scene in which an old, naked man comes on a stage “on all fours” painted several colors and the narrator says it’s haw-haw funny. This moment has had to be explained in millions of classrooms, and lives somewhere in millions of brains

Think it’s important for public high school teachers to grasp that our classes are, for many of our students, one of the very few humanities courses they’ll take in a formal educational setting—and, in many cases, the only ones

Benefit of shifting to journals instead of handouts/computers: a lot more writing, cool little doodles from kids, feels like we’re really doing something Drawback: how do I carry ~120 books home

Annoying thing about skills-based English class is that its efficiencies—easy to train teachers around it, easy to measure student outcomes, easy to articulate definitions of proficiency—make the better, more holistic alternative seem wasteful and a little ridiculous.

Some kid art for your Friday

langston hughes on walt whitman, 1953

c o l l a g e

(Directions for anyone who wants to give it or something like it a whirl—points are silly but it helps them prioritize/they like points, so)

The American Lit kids are going to cut up our first three texts tomorrow—a 1493 Columbus letter, an excerpt from De Las Casas, and a Lenape myth—to make little collage poems, using art books/photography books as backdrops. Glad I teach HS so I can do arts n crafts/curious what they do.

Talked about Twain’s irony today and man the way the guy could traverse the territory from “ha ha” funny to “oh my god” funny in like one paragraph really makes this guy both difficult and important to talk about.

James on reading: “It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.” Thinking about the massive list of barriers we’ve constructed around young people’s (and their teachers’) understanding of reading that make this both thrillingly provocative and sad.

Do admire Michael for having such an extreme experience with drugs that it resulted in a series of books. Imagining him as like a kind of spooky/basically nice high school kid

As I keep teaching/thinking about Huck I keep returning to the irony that pro-canon arguments are coded as conservative when in reality any respectable version of the American canon requires any decent teacher to endorse extremely critical discussions about American history/life

Teaching in NYC: in November, taking kids to the amazing archivists at the NYPL to see diaries of Whitman and Thoreau, and to poke around in their photo archives; in December, taking them to see Oedipus staged at (!) Studio 54

Being late to Percival Everett and knowing how prolific he is reminds me of halloweens when I came home with bags stuffed with Reese’s cups, the best Halloween finds. A wild gift to have so many good books from one amazing mind to read.

Interesting talking with the kids today about why this feels relevant to think about as modern Huck readers, facing our own set of combustibles

Nice thing about teaching a book is I can just do this at the start of the lesson, get some questions and scenes from them, and there we have the basis for 45 minutes’ worth of discussion, writing, and thinking. Nice lil curriculum package.

Working on a little essay about adaptations as a form of close reading and as a tool for teaching HS kids a kind of close reading that doesn’t just venerate the Text Itself. Anyone have any favorite essays about “adaptations” as a literary genre/approach?

Shoutout to bird names

Lesson planning from some salacious college-level propaganda material—can totally see what has everyone so upset

Man I cannot wait to read this with my kids after we’re done with Huck.

This baseball story—homerun off a fastball, strikeout off a 35mph pitch—pretty much captures the dynamic of teaching the same lesson twice and having it alternately succeed/fail. thelibertyline.com/2025/09/07/n...

Had a kid tell me she isn’t “into” the book we’re reading yet and I realized “getting into a book” is a phrase that’s actually much more interesting than it sounds—what’s happening when you’re “into” a book? It’s not just “being entertained.” You’re in it—the book’s including you in meaning making.

Introduced Huck Finn and James today to the kids—after introducing the books, read them the first line of Everett’s book (“Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass”, referring to Huck/Tom).That’s all we’ll read of James until we’re done w Huck, but glad we have that tension.

This little quiet before a day of✨teaching ✨

i wrote about teaching it for the awl (rip): www.theawl.com/2017/06/jem-...

Students are starting Huck Finn this week/will be reading a poem each week as a kind of combo classwork/homework thing. If you were teaching that book, which poems would you teach alongside it? Connections don’t need to be obvious

Percival Everett on reading. Reminds me of Borges saying readers are more important than writers—a line I like to use w my kids.

This month, NYC schools will announce data about how many schools have journalism programs. The numbers will be low. Important, I think, to keep in mind what this is a proxy for: the systematic dismantling of enrichment in urban schools, something done under the umbrella of “academic excellence.”

Still doing his thing—got to respect the hustle

One question my students discussed today was whether or not their own lives align with stories about what it means to be an American, and one girl said she’d never been asked that question before. Others agreed. Was reminded of one of the privileges of this job: we get to ask them big stuff first.

Sad I’m missing this/hope this means more people teach “James”; planning to teach it/Huck has been one of the most productive professional experiences I’ve had recently. Clarifies all sorts of things: the stakes of close reading, the meaning of “canon,” the place of “craft” in academic settings

The sonnets are sliced

Had to add a third, least-well spoken level to this haunting ad, “well-read person,” which is the level you get to when you’ve actually done the reading and are incapable of speaking well anymore because you’ve read so much about something that the complexity of it stuns/incapcitates you.

Say whatever you want about public schools and your little attempts to replace them—doesn’t undermine the outrageous fact that my colleagues and I have built a system that will enable 1 million kids to rocket through our country’s biggest city on Thursday to get publicly funded care and education.

Have been reading some good close readings of this book, and probably no other book I’ve taught makes it so obvious that a good close read is essentially autobiographical—an account of a reader wrestling with a book, not simply distilling its meaning.