Of course, I didn’t know—none of us did—that the coronavirus was coming; it was going to make my student teaching experience even more challenging and rich than I could have imagined. My 15 weeks as lead teacher at Troy High School began at the end of January 2020 as I took over for mentor Erin Fischer-Ballew’s two sections each of English 10 Honors and English 12 Literature and Composition.

I took over at semester. I knew nearly all of the 12th graders from the prior semester when I’d been there only part time for my pre-student teaching work (observations, individual lessons, and two one-week spans). Almost half of the 10th graders had their schedules rearranged at the semester break, so I had a great opportunity to introduce myself and my expectations:

1. Everyone in the room is to be treated with dignity and respect.
2. All ideas are valid, but I expect you to back them up with support and to be willing to have those ideas respectfully challenged by myself or other students. Education is a dialogue.
3. I know that your first work is not always your best work; if it is turned in on time, I’ll provide feedback and allow revision.
4. Everyone in this room is on their way to adulthood and cell phones are 21st Century tools that we need to learn to use responsibly. As long as they are used appropriately, for class purposes or emergencies, I’ll allow them—otherwise they become guests of my desk for at least the remainder of the hour.

I knew that it was going to be imperative that I hook the students early-on or risk losing them for the whole unit. I began with a fun exercise based on English rap artist Akala’s TedTalk “Hiphop & Shakespeare?” Each student received a piece of paper with a different quote on it and they had to work together to determine whether the quote came from a Hiphop song or from Shakespeare. It was a lot of fun with a lot of movement, laughter, and surprises. They also performed a line-toss, trying out decontextualized lines from Hamlet with different emotional emphases to explore the ways that meaning can change in context. We even took some time to review conventional grammar and syntax to better understand Shakespeare’s often inverted forms.

My 10th Grade Honors English class was much more regimented with the design being largely controlled from the outside. I collaborated with other 10 Honors and 11 AP teachers to select and arrange essays to be analyzed and assessments to be given. Generally, students explored a new rhetorical mode each week—narration and description, causal analysis, process analysis, and so on—by analyzing the rhetorical moves in a given set of essays. They then engaged in Harkness discussion of those essays and their rhetorical moves, followed by practice writing formal rhetorical analysis. Throughout, they also produced and responded to mode-themed blog posts which I used as formative assessments to be able to further determine their understanding of the modes.

While looking for a solution, we stumbled upon the idea of having a separate online ‘chat’ happening in the outer circle concurrent with the verbal discussion in the inner circle. To execute this idea, I created a live Google Doc for each discussion that the outer-circle students could all work on simultaneously and then be taken over as the students switched positions. Because those in the outer circle were responding both to what they heard in the inner circle and to each other, these documents also served as useful records of these student-lead conversations.

Then came the day the schools closed their buildings and we all went online. This was less jarring for many of my students as I’d made it a point to engage them with newer technology and media from the beginning. To aid in the transition, though, I began producing a podcast of my own that would act as part of my daily communication with them. For each episode, I would read a poem or short excerpts from literary works that might be new to them. I would then ask the students to consider these works in relation to their individual experiences of the coronavirus crisis. Besides that, I’ve continued to work with students through their blogs, online discussions, and videos. I even created “Mr. Karl’s Alternative Spring Break Lit-Film Festival” as a way to help students process their thoughts and feelings while under orders to stay home during the pandemic. Here, they could choose a literary excerpt that really spoke to them and, in a short video, read it aloud with as much or as little video finesse as they were comfortable with.