Went to Chinatown, the Whitney, and the Met today. It’s such a privilege to be surrounded by people making things and keeping culture alive. Humans!

“tragedy, ecstasy, doom”

🥰

Would say that about 60% of my students own a sweatshirt that says ESSENTIALS FEAR OF GOD on it

Great little volume/a reminder that one of the best things about caring about poetry is hearing what others have made of things you’ve liked

If you’re looking to support good politics, consider donating to @joel4jc.bsky.social. He’s a dad, a friend, a union organizer—and clearly qualified for the job he’s running for. Headed for a runoff in Jersey City. secure.actblue.com/donate/joel-...

Rereading “the wings of the dove” since it’s insanely immersive and fun, and I forgot that “iced coffee” makes its way in—find that surprising for some reason, like I thought cool cafes invented that

I love this insane album art. “Let’s…scatter the cover with things that look like playing cards. Marble background.”

One thing you learn with experience is that even successful test prep, the kind that produces good numbers, can be bad pedagogy. You could just do this kind of stuff instead—but only if you’re given the latitude to determine the ends of a literary education for your kids.

One fun thing about teaching in NYC is that we have orgs like @thecity.nyc to keep us all posted—they were the subject of our HS journalism meeting yesterday, since our kids read their morning emails to stay up to speed. Good stuff—donate if you’re looking for somewhere to spend money usefully

FYI, fellow Manhattan/NYC teachers www.uft.org/get-involved...

There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will

Think that “book studies” and “reception studies” should be a bigger part of English teacher education programs. This stuff is basically what we do all day.

Doomsaying and throwing our hands up at how hard it is to get kids to do stuff like read/not use GPT, especially when it comes from adults tasked with taking care of kids, is just such a depressing capitulation to the wrongheaded belief that it’s impossible to capture kids’ imaginations

Fun Strand find

Friendly reminder that we never know who’s sitting in our classrooms out here www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025...

No hate because I know how hard it is to write good questions but the badness of this question from a teacher resource is really funny

Transcendentalism found poetry tomorrow, mixing and matching texts to make new texts, here we go. Then off to see Thoreau’s journals in the archives with the children next Friday.

Have no idea what my kids are going to make of these plays/am very curious

Going to inscribe @manshel.bsky.social into the American HS canon by assigning this essay to my 11th graders next week www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

Democracy is cool but it comes with so many text messages

Wallace Stevens bein a weirdo

The Gatsby Party thing makes pretty explicit my belief that helping young people develop good taste is a meaningful political project

Every public school teacher you know now knows more about how to help families find affordable food than they did about a week ago. In case any anti-teacher-union types are curious, this is what those disruptive organizers have been texting/emailing each other about all weekend.

Sometimes think about Adorno being scandalized by the notion that he might have hobbies. “I have no hobby.” Did make some fair points about free time! But “I take them all, without exception, very seriously” is a very funny sentence.

Nice little sub-crisis of the literacy crisis is a baffling refusal by all parties to talk about English like it’s an art class

Thinking about how much fun it would be to talk shit about people with Henry James

Ah

Fall mornings 🫢

Cool book—Kristin Dykstra’s “Dissonance.” It’s so nice to read something that is just doing its own thing—in this case, making Vermont feel very intense.

Kid with fake blood smeared all over her face wrote a pretty solid essay about Walden in class today

Just submitted my ✨33rd college recommendation of the year✨

Don't exactly know why this popped into my head but if anyone on #BookSky is looking for an INCREDIBLE work of historical fiction that kinda shreds a lot of the usual mechanisms of the genre but is also wise & kinda quiet I recommend The Corner that Held Them portersquarebooks.com/book/9781681...

Had about 30 kids in a messy inner/outer circle setup talking about James and Huck today, and one kid suggested that the solution to the (her words) “invisible chains of social norms” is empathy, and the kids nodded/discussed what these books teach us about that. Tomorrow we’re talking about freedom

Funny, thorny thing about ed policy discourse is that this is basically an axiomatic progressive education claim people who use “progressive education” as a cudgel at least nominally endorse, and it’s something that politically progressive people have in lots of circles essentially abandoned.

My Banned Books class is reading THE BLUEST EYE right now, and it’s so magical being able to sit with such a rich text and close read it. We learn so much together. It’s also so fun watching many students read and engage with their first Morrison novel.

Feel like I cracked some kind of code by having the extremely fortunate opportunity to teach HS at a school with university library access

I loved this essay, particularly this part about the “family” of critics, artists, and readers—and would include teachers in this family, too. A nice read. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Think it’s funny that Henry James begrudged Emerson’s walking too quickly through the Louvre and then used that as a frame of reference for critiquing Emerson as a thinker. Just imagining James panting, whispering “slow down goddammit”

Some of the most important and fulfilling moments of my life have happened while reading novels. It’s a very strange way to have found value on this earth. And society seems determined to give up on reading entirely.

Think Emerson’s “creative reading” offers a nice corrective to instrumentalized forms of close reading that we now work with. “One must be an inventor to read well” is a pretty interesting argument.

Halloween movie set in New Jersey called Ho-Ho-Kus Po-Ho-Kus

Actually find it kind of charming that every teenager says bro now

I didn’t not buy this at Target

Just need everyone to brace themselves for the inevitable article entitled “Teachers are Bringing Back Books—But is it Working?” and I encourage people to understand that “is it working” is not a neutral question but the people who ask it usually sincerely think that it is

More of this! For Eng teachers, professors, or teacher educators looking for related research & resources creating connections: A) Buy Dan/Johanna’s book. I was fortunate to get a review copy & it rocks B) Check my 🧵 of resources & researchers. ⤵️ C) Support disciplinary literacy policy/initiatives

I worked in book publishing before teaching, and didn’t blink at not using books. It’s wild the way pedagogical training, which prepares teachers to survive in a professional context shaped by policy, can override our sense of what reading can be/is for.

Kid told a coworker today that my class is “what he always imagined an English class would be like” and my day is ~made~. That’s basically exactly what I’m going for. Nothing weird. Just English class stuff.

It’s interesting that widespread access to literary instruction, of any kind, for American high school aged kids is a phenomenon that is younger than my grandpa, who was born in the 30s. We’re only like 80 years deep into this experiment.

Grateful for this book project’s potential for carving out a clear space for productive dialogue between critics and HS teachers. How we define close reading in high school is surprisingly high stakes: entire state and federal policies are organized around a dated definition of it.