Romeo & Juliet's Crime Scene

To introduce my students to Romeo & Juliet and have them make some predictions before we started reading, this week I made a crime scene of their deaths. It turned out to be one of those lessons where every student is immediately engaged.


The forensics teacher set me up with caution tape, plastic sheeting, some skulls and bones, and fake blood. I set up evidence markers for my crowbar, a stage dagger, and a vial from the theater department. I intended a table to serve as Juliet's deathbed, but it needs a tablecloth and pillow to look the part. Then I put a picture of Roman catacombs on the digital projector and taped some body outlines on the plastic sheeting.

Next year I think I'll skip the plastic sheeting and fake blood. Some students thought the blood was rubber and others thought it was a tear in the plastic. And the whole reason for the plastic sheeting was so I wouldn't stain the carpet with the fake blood. I also forgot Paris, which would have added some mystery to the activity.

Weeks later, when we were finishing the play, students could be overheard saying, "So that's why there was a crowbar!" or, "That's why she died on top of him."

If you'd like to borrow this idea, here are copies of the evidence gathering sheet, Romeo's autopsy report, and Juliet's autopsy report. If you have other ideas to make this activity better or your own unique way of starting a Shakespeare unit, leave it in the comments.

A License to Teach

When I moved to Denver from Portland and started working at Lake International School, I thought I had a good sense of how to do this teaching job right.  I had 8 years under my belt in rural, suburban, and urban schools, though most in rural.  I was appreciated by colleagues and administrators at these schools, at least partially due to my skills as a teacher.  I had finished my master's degree, had a reading specialist endorsement, and taught a successful model lesson at Lake, an inner city school with over 95% of their students on free or reduced lunch.  I had two job offers on the same day and jumped at Lake because I hadn't done it, the model lesson went so well, the school was beautiful, and it was a middle school, which I've wanted to teach in since I was in middle school.

The principal asked me a question after I did my model lesson: "You used a number of cues to get students' attention or to get them to do what you wanted them to do.  How do you set that up at the beginning of the year?"  I didn't have a good answer for her, but she said she was willing to take a "leap of faith" for me.  The right answer now (I think, or a part of the answer), almost two years later, is to expect 100% compliance every time.  When I taught at St. Helens, I could get 70% on day one.  At Lake, I got 80% during that first month.  And it steadily decreased from then on.  I am certain my principal regretting taking that leap of faith.

I spend a lot of time in my classroom building community.  At Health and Science School, the public magnet school I worked at, I spent the first month on nearly nothing but that, and reaped the benefits.  But I think doing that at Lake gave the students the idea that it would be all touchy-feely all the time.  I should have done a little bit of that each day, but I should have shown them how hard we could work, because by the time I was ready to do work, I'd already lost their respect (or, rather, hadn't earned it to begin with).

The biggest thing, though, the number one cause of my failure as an inner-city teacher, is going into the job with guilt.  I reasoned, both consciously and unconsciously, that I lived a childhood of privilege.  There was always food on the table.  My parents only had to work one job.  I lived in a safe neighborhood.  My brother didn't deal drugs. So what right did I have to tell someone without all those supports what to do?

My right came from two college degrees and a teaching license.  But instead of exercising that right, I gave them the idea that I didn't care.

Both my coach and my principal tried to tell me that.  But it took 10 weeks of summer to get it through my thick skull.

I didn't get the chance to continue at Lake, which is probably good.  I'm not ready for the big leagues.  But I did learn a lot that has improved my practice this year:

• No nonsense nurturing
• The skillful use of sentence frames
• Focused Rove
• Extremely useful lesson planning that doesn't create an overwhelming workload
• Planning ahead be creating exemplars
• Brain breaks

And I imagine I'll add more to this list as I think of it.  And link to posts about each one from here.

I can feel a divide developing in my career between pre-Lake and post-Lake.  Pre-Lake, in Oregon, I presented lessons, provided feedback, retaught what I needed to, graded summative assessments; I did everything to make me good teacher, and enough to score "effective" on my districts' evaluation rubrics.

Post-Lake, I make students learn¹. And I've seen sometimes this year, I can make them like it.

And that's why this is my anthem this year:



1. Not that the students aren't due the credit. They've worked for it. (I just made them. Bwahahaha!) Go back.

2016-2017 Anthem

It's been a tough year moving from rural Oregon to inner-city Denver.  Tougher than I expected.

More on that to come.  For now, here's my anthem from this last year, "Runnin' Just in Case" by Miranda Lambert.

Students and Social Media

This is why I use social media with my students: a research essay is due at midnight tonight.  I just spent 20 minutes in a direct message helping a student organize her main points so she could work past some writer's block.

A Case for Balancing the High School Literature Curriculum - Part I

I went into college with grandiose plans of taking a separate class each for Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare.  I was going to be a English major and then become a teacher.  Because, after all, "Teaching is just presenting information enthusiastically," my pompous, arrogant, college freshmen self thought.  So I plugged along, taking not one but two classes on Shakespeare (fun!), two very bad Survey of American Literature courses (ugh), American Novels 1945-Present (okay) where I struggled to read a novel a week, and immediately dropped some course on early English novels that were written as a series of letters to avoid being scandalous (barf).

My first semester as a junior, I realized that in addition to presenting information enthusiastically, I would also need a teaching license, and apparently my enthusiasm alone wouldn't get me one of those.  So I reluctantly began taking education courses.  Schooling in the United States.  Boring.  Literacy and the Learner.  Could be interesting, but the adjunct professor just preached about multiple intelligence theory most of the time.  Really, both classes could have been better if they weren't one evening a week for three hours.

And then there was Adolescent Literature.

That is where I learned what teaching really is.  That there is a science to it.  That there were strategies that taught students best.  It was in this class that I fell in love with book clubs.  And where I read all the literature that I had never read as an adolescent.  Monster.  Son of the Mob.  Feed.  Speak.  The House on Mango Street.  Out of the Dust.  My middle and high school years would have been so much brighter with books that I could relate to.

The only book that qualified as young adult literature I read in middle or high school for a language arts class was Are You There God, It's Me, Margret.  Never read it?  Go read the synopsis.  Right now.  Really.  I'll wait.

What adolescent boy would want to read that book¹?

I finished my English degree with a double concentration in education and literature.  It seemed silly not to finish the literature concentration after spending two years in literature courses.  But taking those classes in conjunction with Adolescent Literature and my own personal life experience embedded in me a dislike of the canon, especially teaching it.  Why teach that when there was so much good literature that spoke to my adolescent self?  What great books I missed out on.  What great books my students would be missing out on.

I started this post because I'm in the second week of my Action Research Proposal class, working to finish up my masters.  I thought I was going to do my research on using young adult literature in book clubs to connect with the canon.  And as I was freewriting on that I found myself asking again, why is it so important to teach the canon?  How will I explain to my students why they should care?

The next day, I asked my colleagues at school.  And they had some pretty good answers, which I'll paraphrase below as I understand them, because it's Sunday and I want to ask before quoting their e-mails:

• The canon, better than anything else, addresses the issues that are at the heart of the human condition.  What other text on the same themes can equal To Kill a Mockingbird?  None that I know of. 
• Cultural relevancy and the ability to understand allusions to greater works isn't just good for cocktail parties.  It actually makes you smarter because you're able to understand so much more.
• Without reading enough of the canon, you cannot understand most of Western Civilization and how those in power remain in power.  Instead of being an agent of change against the status quo, you are a cog in their machine.  The Republic by Plato was used as an example text.