What Will My Students Remember?

Stop for a just a moment and think—what do you remember from freshmen English class?

I've been asking this question a lot lately—to everyone from other ACE teachers who are self-proclaimed "science people" to adults who are decades out, and even my juniors at TC. Despite this variety, I've been getting similar answers. Everyone remembers their teacher, of course, and how they felt about him or her. That always comes first. Most people can then also remember some of the books they read, maybe a particularly poignant short story, and perhaps even a writing assignment, if it was creative or personal. But the day-to-day? Not much. Could they tell me how their teacher introduced Shakespeare or the concept of theme? Usually not.

So where does that leave a smiling, optimistic, brand new teacher like the one pictured here?

Most of what happens in our classrooms will be forgotten. And while this truth can be comforting in certain low moments, it's also somewhat unsatisfying, and I approach it like a challenge.

We remember things that engage us, which somehow manage to reach us on a deeper level. Memory is a process of connection-making. It seems to me that it is an English teacher's job (and in fact, his or her privilege) to facilitate these connections—not just within and among books, but between books and their readers.

In light of this, my approach to teaching has changed.

Now, I focus primarily on facilitating connections between ideas. While reading "The Most Dangerous Game," for instance, we came upon these lines:

"Sometimes I think evil is a tangible thing—with wavelengths, just as sound and light have. An evil place can, so to speak, broadcast vibrations of evil."

In each of my freshmen classes, we left the text to have a discussion about evil. Perhaps a bit of a dark topic, but an important one. They shared stories of times in which they had felt "vibrations" of evil and their opinions about whether evil truly existed. I couldn't call on people fast enough, and they were listening intently to one another about Ouija boards and ghost stories. Fifteen truly fascinating minutes later, we returned, with a clear understanding of what Whitney meant by those lines.

Then, at the end of this haunting story, in which one human hunts another because he's bored of hunting animals, we stopped to talk about theme. What was this story trying to teach us? I posed the question just like that, and here's what they came up with: "We are all born in the image and likeness of God," "Life is not game," and "In some games, there are two losers."

Wow. As a class, we launched into a discussion about humanity. Could one lose their humanity? What kind of situations might cause that kind of loss? If "The Most Dangerous Game" was a comment about the effects of war, in what way might it be relevant to the modern world? Had we ever met someone who didn't seem fully human? How can we protect our own humanity and the humanity of others?

My freshmen will probably always remember moments from their first Homecoming Week. But it is my hope that if I teach English 1 correctly, they might also remember something they learned from a very short story about a dangerous game—that their own and others' humanity is fragile, and it should be protected.