Every year they do this to me.  I stay up nights, wake up early, lie in bed only pretending to be asleep trying to figure out how to satisfy sophomores.  Freshmen are new and easy…but something happens when they become sophomores that makes it impossible to design any lesson that will be regarded as fun, worthwhile, or engaging.  My freshman curriculum has changed little in the almost 4 years I’ve been teaching.  We read short stories, and some big classics (Romeo and Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Odyssey).  The order has changed, the assignments, the activities have varied, but the content has stayed pretty much consistent. 

But the sophomore curriculum stays unsatisfying year after year.  I did Julius Caesar the first two years with limited success.  Then I did The Tempest the next two years with the same limited success.  Now I’m contemplating doing Midsummer’s Night Dream and wondering how that would pan out.  Poetry has never been their cup of tea, nor the research project.  And Literature Circles…forget about it.  If a short story is science fiction, I hear, “Why do we always read about things that are unreal?”  If a short story is about high school, or history, I hear other complaints.   If they get to choose what they read…they get mad too.  I just don’t know how to make them happy happy happy and I don’t seem to be able to just give up trying.  I wish I could discover the secret.  The problem is its hard for me to relate.  My sophomore year in high school was the best year.  I had the best teachers.  It was the year that decided in me that I wanted to teach high school and not elementary school and here ten years later sophomores are driving me to my wits end….I always feel completely incompetent with them and like jello in the hands of my 4-year-old squeezed out of shape and macerated, pressed into oblivion by his grubby little fingers until chipper jiggles are replaced by slurping green slush.

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