Happy Spring, wonderful readers!
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston says that “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” I’ve found this to be very true, although there are also occasionally years like the one I’ve had that offer little time for pondering either questions or answers.
This is all to say that I’m sorry to have been away for such a long stretch. Such is the nature of both life and of teaching though. We plan our best, but sometimes the realities on the ground have other plans for us.
The good news is that 2025 has so far been a year offering both interesting questions and answers, along with some time to start thinking about both, and I’m excited to start regularly doing that in this newsletter again. To get the ball rolling, I thought I would start with a quick post sharing what I’m always looking for in these early spring months: lesson ideas that I can use to bring some new life to the old questions we’ve been studying through the long months of winter here in Michigan, starting with a new favorite lesson of mine from the fall on a favorite topic, the essay.
Essays can offer so many positives to students; they can push student understanding deeper, build focus, and practice everything from argumentation to synthesis. But at the same time they are devilishly hard to teach well, especially given that so many students come into our classes already disliking them. I have been teaching students to write essays longer than my students have been alive, and yet at times the valleys in my essay units can still feel like they outnumber the peaks—that is until this fall when something clicked that led to my freshman to produce essays that would have thrilled me in a class of seniors.
The catalyst for this change was that while writing Good Grammar, I often found myself thinking about how many things we writing teachers value and yet leave unspoken. When I began planning for the year, I realized that nowhere did I have more things that I expected of students without ever making those expectations clear than when it came to essays. This lesson on evidence was one of a suite of lessons that I created to say the quiet parts louder, which in turn helped my students to take their essays to the next level.
Giving Evidence a Fair Shake
A core complaint I’ve often harbored concerning my students’ essays is that I get the same quotes over and over and over again for any given book. And generally these well-worn quotes just so happen to be the quotes listed prominently on quote-harvesting sites (like Lit Charts, Sparknotes or Goodreads) or the ones we discussed in class.
I’ve grumbled about this issue internally for years, but until this fall I haven’t really talked about it with students, so I decided to remedy that with this lesson, which ended up being both successful and an awful lot of fun:
- I began my lesson by asking my students what the purpose of evidence is. Like with most things, they got it quickly: Evidence invites the reader in and makes them a fellow passenger, not just a passive observer. The reader get to see the genesis of the argument themselves, which—if done right—adds piles of credibility. Further, evidence can help the writer to focus and dig deeply. While I tend to raise an eyebrow at educational talk of silver bullets, I have found that the right piece of evidence can be a panacea for so much of what often ails mediocre essays.
- After we discussed what evidence can do, I then, in a somewhat conspiratorial tone, let students in on a little secret: I see the same half dozen or dozen quotes over and over and over again when I teach a book.
- I next asked the students why the same quote comes up over and over. This, too, they got quickly: Because they are the ones on all the online quote boards. And then I followed this with another question: If you were the teacher and came across an essay filled with those same quotes, what would your thoughts be? The looks on my students’ faces at this question were priceless and let me know that talking more directly about evidence was a very good idea.
- I then concluded this little mini-sermon by telling students that when students use those common quotes, it feels like they didn’t read or pay attention. That is probably the case in some situations, but I also think those common quotes come just as often from students who did read but didn’t know how to find evidence properly or rushed the evidence section.
- Next, I gave them a simple goal when it comes to evidence: For them to take a bit of time to find the right evidence—evidence that is “evident.” Evident and evidence share a common root in the Latin word Evidens for obvious or apparent, and the right piece of evidence—one that is truly obvious or apparent—can essentially settle an argument right there.
- We then discussed what can be evidence and came up with a large list ranging from quotes to statistics to logical proofs.
- And lastly, to bring it all home, we played a game. For this game, I divided them into groups and gave them a bunch of silly questions: Do pineapples belong on a pizza? Who is the best Spiderman? Dogs or cats? Etc. And their job was to make an argument and support it with the best piece of evidence. In doing this, no explanation or reasoning was allowed. The evidence had to be so evident as to win the day without even a syllable of justification.
In Good Grammar, I discuss how every student brings an idiolect or a way of speaking and expressing themselves that the world has never seen before. And yet so often they tamp the uniqueness of voices down in favor of a bland average that they mistake for professionalism. After this lesson, I realized how the well-worn quotes that proliferate discussion of books online do a similar thing. They lead students away from their own unique thoughts about a text and towards tired topics and arguments that the students mistake as being more correct or what the teacher will likely want. This lesson helped a great deal with disrupting this dynamic, and when students were directly challenged to find new, unique, and truly evident evidence (and taught how), their essays suddenly grew far richer, more engaging, and ultimately more them than any I’d ever seen before.
Thank you for reading, and look for a new post next Friday with another favorite fall lesson. It is good to be back!
Yours in teaching,
Matt
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Matthew M. Johnson 
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