Welcome to English Teacher Weekly—your source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities.
A couple notes from the ETW offices: This week I’m experimenting with a new format, just for fun. I’m not sure it really hits. We’ll see. And for the next two weeks, I’ll be on the road with the family. Time for a brief summer break from ETW’s regular programming. I hope to publish an abbreviated edition along the way, but for now, the Basque Country awaits.
If you’re a new subscriber, welcome! Thank you for joining the club. For those of you sharing ETW with your likeminded friends, I’m deeply grateful. Enjoy this week’s edition!
The Tony Awards: Best Revival
Two highlights for you from the 2025 Tony Awards were last week. Eureka Day won for best revival of a play.
First staged in pre-pandemic 2018, Eureka Day is a satire set at a fancy private school in Berkeley, California as an outbreak of mumps takes the lid off the community’s underlying rage. The NYT calls it “as sharp a biopsy of wokeness and obtuseness as you could want, needling people on both sides of the issue.”
The Tony Awards: Best Actress
Sarah Snook won for best leading actress, for her one-woman show of Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray—playing 26 different characters.
Here is Snook’s interview with The New Yorker about the role:
When you won your Olivier for this part, you thanked Wilde for his “yummy” language—but it’s also terribly sad, isn’t it?
In terms of the play, there’s something restorative about releasing into that sadness, yeah. There’s a moral at its core—in that there’s a moral person that is corrupted, yes, but in the way we’ve staged it, that question is not answered. I think that’s thrown to the audience. Did he go to heaven, or did he go to hell? I think the thing that Oscar was writing about in the novel, and that we display in the play, is the multiplicity of humankind, irrespective of gender. We can all be seduced by the prospect of eternal life and beauty.
The Future of the Novel
, editor of , on the future of the American novel:What is possible now, as fame and acclaim and riches become more unattainable for the novelist in this culture, is a purity of pursuit — a dive into art for true art’s sake, since it must inevitably be for that and likely nothing else, not for celebrity or a blockbuster film. There are fewer and fewer literary stars, and fewer and fewer stars of any kind; the universe today is vaster, populated by many more cultural galaxies, and one master of one realm can be completely unknown in another. If the writer is disabused of their outdated notion of “making it,” of owning two or three homes off the proceeds of a book and swaggering into Elaine’s with Woody and Mailer and Keith Hernandez, then the act of writing itself becomes something else, perhaps something more transcendent — a spiritual quest, akin to the monks who spent centuries preserving written records with little payoff beyond the knowledge that their work would inform an unimaginable future, long after they were dead. To be human is to create — this is why AI can be so insidious, working against this impulse which has rested within us for millennia — and as long as there are humans on this Earth, there will be novels. Small press, big press, no press; stories will be told, language will evolve, and greatness will always be possible.
The Power of the Pocket Notebook
I love any kind of commonplace book-ish, weekly journal-ish assignment. Here is a peak inside Austin Kleon’s pocket notebook for inspiration.
The Pathless Path
Here is
on understanding ourselves in times of loss and depression, when you’re certainly on a journey but the path is obscured.Anyone who has suffered real loss, the loss of a child a, a marriage, a well-loved home, has always had difficulty conveying the absolute sense of devastation to those who are at present more fortunate. As if standing on fishes, Rilke described it, as if the ground had a life of its own and were swimming away underneath him.
Disney’s Snow White
Disney’s 1937 Snow White was “the first favorite film”
ever had. Her recent post “The War on True Love” breaks down how the symbolism and imagery of the original Disney production compares to the 2025 live action adaptation.The Case for Short Books
Here is #6 of
’s 7 brief arguments for reading short books:Their brevity tightens their focus. Authors who write short have to write sharp. I’ve never forgotten George Will’s description of David Frum’s Dead Right: “As slender as a stiletto and as cutting.” That’s not just a statement of style. Short page counts require authors to distill and concentrate. Readers benefit from the focus.
Summer is the perfect time for a novella, and Miller’s suggestions look spot on. Next on my list is Tove Jannson’s The Summer Book.
Pop Culture Principals
I loved this “Compendium of Pop Culture Depictions of Principals” from
. I don’t want to brag, but my hometown of Chattanooga is the home of Dennis Haskins, who played Mr. Belding on Saved by the Bell. About once a year the whole town is aflutter with a new Mr. Belding sighting at a bar or bowling alley.Where would American pop culture be without the bumbling, lovable school principal, a distant cousin of the British headmaster archetype of Dickens and Brontë? My votes go to The Simpson’s Principal Skinner, one of the show’s perfect side characters. And, of course, to Mr. Belding.
Farewell Walter Brueggemann
Christianity Today’s obituary of Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament professor and author of the widely influential book The Prophetic Imagination. You can listen to his 2018 interview at On Being with Krista Tippett here. She describes him as:
one of the world’s great teachers about the prophets who both anchor the Hebrew Bible and have transcended it across history. He translates their imagination from the chaos of ancient times to our own. He somehow also embodies this tradition’s fearless truth-telling together with fierce hope — and how it conveys ideas with disarming language. “The task is reframing,” he says, “so that we can re-experience the social realities that are right in front of us, from a different angle.”
AI’s College Takeover
From
: Marc Watkins documents how Generative AI snuck its way onto college campuses through the back door:“…across nearly every campus, there are dozens of applications that have quietly integrated generative AI during the past two years. You don’t hear about that story because nearly all of these AI features came through system updates with existing contracts. AI arrived via free upgrade, not through intentional purchases. I know that isn’t a very sexy story, but it is one that should be analyzed because the risks are many and easy to ignore.”
Designed for Deception
In other AI news, here’s
on how the chat interfaces aren’t merely hallucinating; they’re designed to deceive.Any other software program you have ever used, when you try something it’s not capable of it will return a straightforward response “error.” This is true even of user error, but OpenAI chooses not to do this.
As to why, I assume it is because like most software seeking purchase in today’s marketplace it is optimizing not for utility, but for engagement.
If you would like to get deeper into the weeds with this, I’d suggest reading
’s piece “Diabolus Ex Machina” first, which Warner references. It’s a one-way ticket to crazy town.Writing is Good for You
writes a good old fashioned persuasive essay on why writing is good for you. Excellent fodder for your mini-sermons catalog. The Pub Project
Lydia Wood is on a mission to draw all of London’s 3,500 pubs.
Books that Hold Water
For The New Yorker, Robert Macfarlane discusses books that artfully depict rivers and water, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Raymond Carver’s poetry.
“Rivers pose the greatest and most fascinating problems for language. They tumble you, they wear you away, and they dissolve the usual shells of perceptions,” he said. “I’ve had river journeys that have left my senses, of time in particular, more confounded and involuted than any huge mountain expedition.”
The Ditch Weekly
The NYT reports on a group of local teenagers from Montauk that started a summer newspaper, The Ditch Weekly (gift link). Real kids writing real journalism printed on newsprint. Inspiring stuff!
The Ditch team published 10 issues last summer before taking a break to start high school. But on FaceTime calls and in English class, where Billy sits one desk in front of Teddy, they have been plotting their return.
For The Ditch Weekly’s sophomore summer, its staff has swelled to 20 teenagers. Their goal is to distribute 2,000 copies of the paper a week through Labor Day, funded entirely by ad sales. And they do not want their parents to be involved — except for when they need their parents to drive them places.
Perhaps most ambitious of all, they hope to persuade other teenagers to put down their phones and pick up a newspaper.
“When you’re on your phone, it gets boring after a while,” said Dylan Centalonza, 14, a new writer for the paper who covers motels with her twin sister, Fallon. “This is something you have to put work into.”
In related news: For the The Hechinger Report, Lara Bergen makes the case for school newspapers in public schools. Her organization Press Pass NYC helps local schools start sustainable student newspaper programs.
Thank you for the shoutout! As a native of South Carolina, I always detected an accent on Mr. Belding. Now I know why.
Enjoy your time off!