Authored by Matt Luter
Last week, my AP English 11 classes and I spent a week working with several poems by Emily Dickinson–as any good American lit survey would. I assigned them a handful of more familiar, frequently anthologized poems to read as class prep. Then I gave them another option and had them make the call as a class. We can start with one of the assigned poems, I told them, or we can let a random number generator choose a poem for us.
Even having done some prep work, they all chose the random number generator.
Dickinson wrote 1775 short poems that are untitled and known to readers and scholars primarily by numbers assigned by later editors. I had the generator choose a number from 1 to 1775, and that was the poem we discussed, no matter how long or short, accessible or weird.
I cannot recommend this move highly enough. Have some decision fatigue as a teacher? Embrace a mild degree of randomness. Let the universe make some decisions instead.
A few things happen, when some unseen tech gremlin chooses a poem for my class, that take us out of our normal procedures. Primarily, the likelihood becomes really high that I’m going to be talking through a poem with these students that I’ve never seen before. That gives me the opportunity to model reading and interpreting a poem from scratch–which doesn’t mean I become the instant expert either. Yes, sometimes I do get to point out how a word many students know might have a less frequently used secondary meaning on which the whole poem depends, or something like that. But It also means I get to say, “wow, that last line is puzzling me too… anyone have anything?” as a whole class thinks together about the same set of words.
And so the entire class acts on one level together as readers of a single text: everyone’s taking it in all at the same time, allowing different students to bring their skill sets to the table. Once last week the generator took us to a Dickinson poem with an unfamiliar Latin phrase; asking students to try to puzzle it out by recognizing word roots helped some see that they can do more interpretive work on their own than they initially suspected. Another randomly-chosen poem included a quote from the Bible, which led to some practice at how to pick up on an allusion and think through how a writer might be putting it to use. Another was oddly straightforward; we read it aloud, saw that it was far more literal-minded than figurative, and decided that there wasn’t a huge amount there to discuss. So it was time to get a new number. And repeat.
Here’s one other way that I’ve brought randomness into the classroom fruitfully, and again, it’s about poetry.
Last spring I knew I wanted to do a short unit on contemporary American poetry, but again, some decision fatigue had set in, and there are also just too many poets I love for me to make those hard calls of who makes the plan for the week. So I borrowed a wheel from my esteemed colleague Matt Hosler (who, if you didn’t know, has a wheel in his classroom and is happy to lend it out). I put poets’ names on it, and (sigh)… isn’t it beautiful?
Ignore the view of the utility closet, and notice instead the vast options for where in our anthology we might go next, every time a new student volunteers to spin the wheel! And notice as well the danger of landing on Lose A Turn or Bankrupt. (I mean, you’ve all watched Wheel of Fortune. Land on Lose A Turn, and another student gets to spin. Land on Bankrupt, and you lose all your poetry money.)
This worked like a charm in my classes for a few reasons: first, people seem to just love spinning a wheel (don’t you?). I think that’s because it feels like gambling but bears no risk. Secondly, it keeps me on my toes. I’m ready to lead discussion on at least one poem by all of those poets, but having no idea where we’re headed next keeps me (and hopefully a class) interested. And best of all, unexpected things happen, with randomness, like how the most male-heavy class I had last year, with the bro-y-est energy, kept repeatedly spinning the feminist poets on the wheel. If I planned that, it would feel strange and aggressive. If the wheel decides it… well, Audre Lorde it is!
Decision fatigue in the classroom is real. And we can all benefit from the occasional lesson plan that sets aside the usual mode of operations in a classroom and perhaps even throws caution to the wind a little bit. How might your classroom benefit from an intentional dose of randomness?