Teaching in the Age of Attention: A Conversation with High School English Teachers

This piece is a collaborative effort between teachers of literature in high schools and college. It represents a conversation that bridges professional discussion about instruction across levels, and it provides an alternative context for claims about how and why students today might read fewer, shorter, or incomplete texts. Readers of Post45 Contemporaries may arrive at this conversation from the position of college teaching, and, for them, the "specter" announced in the title of this cluster is a figure we can take seriously. The high school English classroom, its texts and its teachers, often appears as figure more than fact. Teachers of high school English should themselves be part of a conversation about how past preparation appears to college instructors, in order to help direct our shared approach to the future.

All of us agree that student reading habits and encounters with our texts are changing, but this isn't something that has happened outside of the feedback loops between pressures on instruction from within secondary schools and from the expectations coming from forces like the college admissions or the culture at large.

We need more opportunities for conversations among those who teach students across levels and make decisions about how and what we teach. The participants included in the conversation below all met in summer 2025 in an MA classroom at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont. We were studying the work of Willa Cather, but because education is so much a part of the institution (many of the students enrolled in the summer program are full-time teachers) our conversations often included topics ranging from student attention, the canon and syllabus formation, and the working conditions of teaching in our moment. This conversation, therefore, is a continuation of many begun in a graduate classroom about how our texts circulate for high school students, college students, and beyond, and about how we read and teach now. The participants include high school English teachers Russell Bollag-Miller, Liz Cettina, Tim Milner, and Ella Zaslow, and college English professor Kate Marshall.

Conversations like these can be a collective attempt to articulate the different kinds of value available in the English classroom—in other words, the things we believe in enough to keep teaching in conditions that make it increasingly possible for students to bypass and evade the kinds of effort we all know are required for literary study to be transformative or rewarding. The questions we ask here are the kinds of questions we hope college professors are asking and will ask: what kinds of compromise are necessary to enable students to engage? What barriers to entry need to be removed or rethought in order for students to push themselves beyond their current attentive, critical, and creative capacities? What kinds of texts, writing assignments, and pedagogies will allow students to buy in?

As teachers, we know the satisfaction of seeing something "work" in a classroom, whether it's a text that yields authentic conversation, a writing assignment that sparks meaningful thinking, or a lesson that convinces students to lean in. Reorienting ourselves through collaborative conversations is a matter of questioning and locating the things that "work" right now. For scholars of literature, these findings yield important information about contemporary sensibilities, attractions, and interests. Since they form an important subset of readers in their own right, we want to make the case for the value of taking students' investments seriously, while also making it possible for them to access those investments to begin with.

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KM: We're thinking together about narratives focused on student attention - the panic about whether students who reach college are prepared or able to read complex and complete texts. But in our conversations about the students we teach, whether in the high school or college classrooms, I don't recognize these caricatured students. It seems much more like the students high school teachers know so well are the same students I meet in the college setting. Maybe we are looking in the wrong place.

TM: When colleges bemoan student readiness, what often gets left out of the discussion is to what extent the full picture of the college application process encourages summative thinking over process thinking. Scholarships based on standardized tests and AP exams force students to prioritize summative thinking, which shifts a teacher's measures of success to a series of scores that their students can achieve rather than different ways that they can think. What is the college professor's understanding of the competing pressures on a high school to produce a "college ready" student? What exactly does that college ready student look like to professors?

KM: Several of my conversations with high school teachers over the past few years have focused on the length of assigned texts. We've debated whether novellas are more popular on the syllabus, and what short novels afford teachers facing pressures on their assigned reading time. Have students' attention spans changed? Is attention the right term?

LC: I feel like it's more about their inability to engage in productive struggle; they give up easily when something's out of their grasp even slightly. They need many more rewards.

RBM: I agree, and I think this often manifests with maintaining attention and encountering difficulty. I've noticed that many students need to have "perfect conditions" in order to read or complete independent work and reading. My school has started to do away with phones in the classroom, which has helped slightly, but students seem to be losing the ability to monotask and to be alone and engaged in independent work.

EZ: One question that has come up in my department is whether skills-driven classes benefit from assigning shorter or longer texts. Each of my department's course courses (9th and 10th grade) reads one novel; the rest are poems, essays, and short stories. There's conversation about whether shorter texts are actually placing greater demands on student attention, since, for instance, reading a set of vastly different short stories requires students to adjust to new worlds, voices, paradigms, etc. If reading load remains relatively stable—we assign roughly the same number of pages whether we're reading short texts or a chapter of a novel—does the consistency of a longer text lower the cognitive load? Does a shift towards shorter texts (and more rapid transitions between texts) feed into the kinds of attention demands students are already facing online?

TM: I've thought about this one a lot this week. It's an interesting conversation. This doesn't answer your question, but some of the things it got me thinking about: I handed out the longest book I'll teach in one of my seminars this week: 318 pages of accessible, contemporary writing (Ann Patchett's Bel Canto). The students' reactions just about its length put us at a disadvantage from the start. It felt so different from handing out the last couple shorter texts. I find there's a general intimidation factor with longer texts that we have to overcome. Also, if students "fall off" at some point, they often find it tougher to catch up and spend a bigger chunk of the semester lost compared to when we read shorter texts.

EZ: Language on English department websites often claims that English classes ask students to see connections between the text and the world. They also frequently suggest that learning to attend closely to a text trains students to pay similar kinds of attention to the world, both textual and non-textual. Does it still make sense to see reading as this kind of perceptual training ground?

LC: Because I've been more invested in my own writing lately, I've been thinking more critically about how I'm both a reading and writing teacher-and writing not just for exams (I teach International Baccalaureate) but also for students themselves. Part of this is in response to anxiety about and students' misuse of AI, but I'm also thinking about what I gained from my high school English experience (I was allowed to write a lot of creative nonfiction instead of straightforward analytical essays). I'm trying to prioritize assignments and revision activities that teach students ways to be artful with their language and discover their own voices in writing (creative nonfiction, analytical writing, a fusion, research writing). I wasn't the most prepared for college-level analytical essays or research papers, but I think it's as much a college professor's job to teach reading and writing skills as it is a high school teacher's. Writing expectations for a general education English course in secondary school should be different from those in college. Also, like Tim suggested above, the majority of the students I teach don't anticipate going into anything English/humanities-related, so it doesn't feel like teaching students specialized English literature courses is necessarily the way to get them invested in the study of reading and writing.

TM: Over the past two years, our department has shifted heavily in this direction. Long, process pieces that are worked on at home and go through multiple drafts are creative nonfiction, personal essays, etc. Analytical writing is happening in class, handwritten. The classic take-home analytical essay about the novel we just read is dead.

RBM: I have noticed a few things related to this at my school, with my colleagues, and in my own teaching. Students seem far more daunted and overwhelmed by a nightly reading load of 20-25 pages than they were pre-pandemic. This has either led to assigning easier texts (much more YA, particularly with 9th grade), shorter texts, or (as I've tried to do) more in-class reading and processing time to "shorten" readings. It seems that students are less able to focus during reading, or give up and resort to using audiobooks instead or in tandem with reading an actual physical text. My department is constantly grappling with trying to cultivate an enjoyment of reading, which often leads to selecting more contemporary and/or less challenging texts.

KM: I've been working with English teachers every summer for a decade, and as a result I'm never not thinking about how high school English affects how students approach the discipline in college, how young people become adult readers, and about the importance of the teaching profession for the future. I don't know that I would be cultivating that perspective in my professional life otherwise, not from a lack of interest but because of the competing pressures on time and attention that affect all of us where we meet our students. What other kinds of institutions or media could help facilitate deeper connections between teachers of literature across high school and college classrooms?

TM: What is an adult reader? Is there a set of qualifications, a list of requirements, a necessary path to becoming this elusive creature?

LC: My school is also doing so many cringey things like having a bulletin board where faculty and staff share what they're reading... as if that's going to do anything.

EZ: I've been really excited about Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant's Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century and the recent conversation around codifying close reading as a methodology in a way that might bridge the divide between high school and college classrooms. They point out that, a lot of the time, close reading means something different in high school and college. Part of what they identify as the source of this difference is the standardized testing that forms part of the Common Core's curriculum, which means that a teacher or computer needs to be able to deem an interpretation "right" or "wrong." As private school teachers, Liz, Tim, Russell and I aren't subject to the same constraints and can teach argumentation in a way that's more closely aligned with college classes, though we certainly operate in relation to a set of assumptions about what thinking in the high school classroom looks like. I love the way that Sinykin and Winant describe the first step of close reading as caring: in their words, caring is the "intellectual prerequisite of interpretation and argument." I think we're all trying to get our students to care about their own ideas and about the texts they're reading.

KM: The undergraduates in my class on novellas this fall are very open about the demands on their time, but we've had great conversations about their futures in reading when they leave educational institutions. They often think of that future as continuous with their educational past. It's also the semester in which I have the most students who have identified themselves as future educators, so there has been more discussion about what they might want to take from their college classrooms to the high school classrooms they hope to inhabit again.

LC: I had a recent experience teaching Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (2016, novel but basically a novella) in which students were actually reading-I could see it with my own eyes after they turned in a quiz. Their pages were turning, they were annotating (without my prodding!), and pointing out quotes to the people sitting next to them that they found interesting, strange, entertaining. That said, the book is easy to read; simple language, simple syntax, and little text on each page (and the number of pages is few already). But the kids loved the book, turned the pages with vigor and excitement, and they engaged in really meaningful, high-level discussions and were better prepared for writing assessments than in the past. Should we prioritize teaching texts that are easy to read so students actually do it? Another thing is that the library circulation at my school is way up this year now that we've instituted a phone ban. Part of what's special with the library is that you can take out books entirely privately; no one but the librarian is allowed to know what you take out. I think this is really special nowadays when everything is public. Maybe reading is shifting into a more private endeavor? I think kids are potentially reading more than it seems?

TM: Thinking about Kate's comment about length and this one paints an accurate reflection of my text-search process these days. Looking for books that are shorter and (likely) contemporary. Looking for the battle to occur in the thematic/metaphorical/subtextual spaces rather than basic comprehension of the language.

LC: I'm wondering about the forms of writing we're teaching and kinds of assessments we're assigning students. I think we can do more to incorporate short-form writing that is meant to be public-facing. In my high school experience-and I think that of many other people-the essays you wrote for English class were only going to be read by you and your teacher (and maybe a peer editor). How can we shift to more public/reader-facing writing to make the work we do in English more relevant and meaningful to students and families? Parents all want their kids to be able to write a personal statement for the common app, but so few students have the skills, desire, or imagination to craft something like that.

TM: I'm struck by the choice of the word "specter" in the cluster description, leading me to wonder what the true specter is in this conversation. The canon is what comes to mind. The difficulty of the process of selecting texts for the high school classroom only increases over time. A teacher must simultaneously cope with state or federal interference, conversations around censorship and banned books, religious pressures, administrative agendas, and more while also trying to advance curriculum to meet the needs and interests of the current generation. Despite all this, I would imagine that many college professors still have a sense that a student didn't get a complete English education in high school if they didn't read a particular text (or texts). Does the specter of a canon compromise our ability to meet in the middle? That is, at the point where the high school teacher's education of the student in English passes to the college professor, does the canon complicate this handing off point?

LC: It also feels like post-secondary English programs are fractured in their approaches to the canon too; there are easy work-arounds to avoid medieval stuff at Wesleyan, for example (the requirement was just Shakespeare and before, so I took metaphysical poetry).

TM: At a time when the allure of the tech industry's capital leads many parents to believe that STEM focused paths possess the greatest benefit to their child's future, we naturally generate bigger questions about the purpose of studying literature. At the heart of literature is the human endeavor and dilemma, investigations of life's purpose and meaning. To what extent is a high school English education responsible for a student's social and emotional learning (SEL)?

RBM: This question makes me consider not just the extent to which English classrooms currently do support students' SEL, but also the extent to which they should. My view is that high school English is positioned to play an increasingly central role in SEL, especially as students face greater time constraints and distractions outside the classroom (in part due to technology, extracurricular obligations, and an increasingly addictive media landscape). From my perspective in an independent school setting, many students appear to lack the solitude and unstructured time necessary to reflect on big questions about identity, purpose, moral development, etc. This year in my philosophy and English classes I've noted how these curriculums, books, etc. provide a rare space for that kind of inward attention that isn't available at home.

EZ: It's inward attention and contemplation, but reading in high school English classes is also a fundamentally collective experience. In addition to maybe fostering an independent reading and thinking practice, high school ideally provides students with the experience of reading in community. In my view, that discussion is just as much a part of that social-emotional learning.

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Russell Bollag-Miller is an Upper School English teacher at Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He teaches interdisciplinary courses in English and Moral Philosophy that emphasize analytical reading, academic writing, discussion, and ethical inquiry. His work centers on curriculum design, student-centered pedagogy, and the development of intellectually rigorous classrooms that support student voice, reflection, and growth.

Liz Cettina is a high school English teacher and a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been featured in The Drift. Other examples of her work can be found at lizcettina.substack.com. 

Kate Marshall is Thomas J. and Robert T. Rolfs College Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she also directs the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good and serves as Associate Dean of Research and Strategic Initiatives. She is the author most recently of Novels by Aliens.

Tim Milner attended the University of Arizona where he completed Bachelor's degrees in English and Music and a Master's in Education. He completed his Master's degree in English at The Bread Loaf School of English. Tim has taught English, film, and journalism at both public and private high schools and currently teaches at The Gregory School in Tucson, Arizona. He is especially interested in genre fiction, mass market paperbacks, popular culture, and folklore. 

Ella Zaslow is a Master's student at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English and an English teacher at San Francisco University High School.