If you are looking to read about how to teach personal statement writing, I’ve got you covered. Keep reading to learn more and to see valuable resources!

At the start of a new school year, I like to assign my students a personal statement as one of the first writing assignments of the year. However, I don’t just assign this to my students and set them free. Instead, I use this personal statement teaching unit to take time to teach my students all about personal statement writing.

Teaching students, especially juniors and seniors, how to write a meaningful and effective personal statement is essential. Our high school students need to know how to highlight their strengths and write positively about themselves in an authentic and professional manner.

It usually always happens like this. I’ll assign the personal statement in August. Students write their personal statements. And then in October or November when students start putting together their college essays, I remind them of their personal statements. And bingo! They have a stellar first draft of their college essay.

How to Teach Personal Statement Writing

When I teach personal statement writing in my classroom, I like to dedicate several days to the assignment. I like to take time with direct instruction. In the lesson, I teach students about what a personal statement is and why they should have one.

What students should include in a personal statement:

• Formal tone
• Professional language
• Precise words

Ideas for students’ personal statements:

• Biggest accomplishment
• Strengths and talents
• Goals and aspirations
• Unique and defining attributes
• Unusual obstacles

Once students have a solid idea about what they should include in their personal statement, I like to pause for a moment before assigning the personal statement. I share examples of already written personal statements with students and have them evaluate each personal statement in small groups. By seeing examples, students are able to see if some of the statements are too generic, too braggy, or just right.

After students read and discuss the sample statements, I assign the personal statement and give them some time to begin brainstorming ideas. I like to take some time on the brainstorming part of the writing process to allow students adequate time to think about what they want to write about. From there, I have students start to outline the structure of their personal statements. From there, we move to drafting, peer editing, and revising.

Teaching Personal Statement Writing

This personal statement writing unit will help your students write phenomenal personal statements that stand out! This personal statement unit includes a presentation for direct instruction and student materials to help students brainstorm, plan, write, and finalize their personal statements.

Ideal for a class assignment or for preparing students to write college entrance essays, this teaching resource includes everything you need from personal statement prompts, to student handouts, to example statements, to peer editing, and more.

Help your students stand out in the crowd by focusing on effective personal statement writing!

What teachers are saying:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Extremely satisfied

“This is a great resource for writing the personal statement. My students found it engaging, relevant, and thought provoking. The guided packet made this a great resource for the kids to complete a unit on personal statement writing. Thank you!”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Extremely satisfied

“My 11/12th graders struggle every year with the personal statement. This resource helped them brainstorm ideas and narrow down their choices. I will be using this with juniors and seniors for a long time!”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Extremely satisfied

“This is a fabulous resource for teaching personal statements! I love how examples are included for students to read. It is so nice to not hunt them down on different websites! I also love how the pre-writing prompts match up with the brainstorming activities. Thank you!”

The content and skills students learn in their middle school English language arts classes provide them with a strong foundation and help prepare them for high school and beyond, and these middle school ELA lessons are just the ticket! From learning about fundamental grammar rules to learning how to become stronger and more confident writers, middle school is an important time for students to begin thriving in their English classes.

Here are 10 must-teach middle school ELA lessons

1. Middle School ELA Lessons: Sentence Structure: Simple, Compound, Complex, and Compound-Complex Sentences

Learning about the different sentence types is a crucial building block to understanding the English language. This sentence structure teaching unit includes a detailed teacher outline, a presentation for direct instruction, practice worksheets, and an assessment.

If you are looking for must-teach high school English lessons, check out this blog post!

Incorporating a growth mindset in the classroom can have quite a few benefits. According to the American Psychological Association, “Growth mindset is the belief that a person’s intelligence and abilities can grow and improve with practice, and researchers have found that brief exercises that increase growth mindset can help keep students motivated when they face challenges, improve their grades, and even increase college graduation rates.”

However, it should also be noted that a growth mindset isn’t a quick fix. Students will need time to process, think about, and reevaluate these concepts throughout the year.

When incorporating a growth mindset into the middle school and high school classroom, teachers should focus on spreading out activities and incorporating them throughout the year rather than all at once.

Here are five ways to incorporate a growth mindset in your classroom

Growth Mindset in the Classroom: Growth Mindset Posters

I have these growth mindset posters displayed in my classroom, and I love how my students see these positive and encouraging quotes all year long. Each poster includes a growth mindset quote. These growth mindset quote posters are a great resource for students to refer back to throughout the entire school year.

Growth Mindset in the Classroom: Growth Mindset Activities for the Secondary Classroom

Create and embrace a growth mindset in your secondary classroom with this Growth Mindset Activities for the Secondary Classroom resource! Introduce growth mindset to your students with a survey, and then complete the activities to help reinforce a growth mindset in your classroom. This resource includes more than 40 pages of useable resources specifically designed to help your middle and high school students develop a growth mindset.

Growth Mindset in the Classroom: Growth Mindset Escape Room

Engage students in hands-on growth mindset activities and challenges with this fun and exciting Growth Mindset Escape Room Activity! This activity will help you facilitate conversations about perseverance, commitment, and achievement!

This resource includes teacher directions, student directions, and all of the printable resources necessary to hold an escape activity in your classroom.

Plus, there are also activities for before and after the escape room to keep the growth mindset conversation going! It is the perfect activity for teaching growth mindset in your classroom!

Growth Mindset in the Classroom: Growth Mindset Bell Ringers

These growth mindset bell ringers are designed with middle school and high schoolers in mind and will get your students thinking and reflecting. There are 30 growth mindset bell ringers in this resource, and each bell ringer includes a growth mindset-inspired quote and a brief writing response.

Students will read the quote and write either an argument, informational, or narrative response. For further classroom engagement, teachers can have students share aloud their responses and create a classroom discussion that paves the way for growth, reflection, and learning. Each day you decide to start class with a growth mindset bell ringer and display the writing prompt on the overhead projector. Students will walk into the classroom, see the prompt, and begin working on their responses.

Growth Mindset in the Classroom: Growth Mindset Character Analysis Activities

Ideal for any novel or short story, these growth mindset character analysis activities help you and your students focus on a growth mindset in an entirely new and unique way.

These character analysis growth mindset activities will help you and your students analyze characters in any work of fiction as to whether they have a growth or fixed mindset. These activities focus on character traits, learning from failures and mistakes, and supporting everything with evidence from the text. This resource includes 12 different organizers, 4 writing prompts, and rubrics.

For further reading about facilitating a growth mindset in the classroom, you can check out this blog post about growth mindset novel recommendations for students and this blog post about growth mindset writing prompts.

Students only have four years in high school English to learn and master so many skills that will help prepare them for college and life after high school. When students leave high school, we hope their English classes have taught them to think critically about what they read and be proficient in writing.

Here are 10 must-teach high school English lessons

1. Embedding Quotes in Writing

One of the first things I teach students is how to embed quotes in their writing. I teach this skill with our short story unit, and I really emphasize how to embed a quote properly. This skill takes time. However, with this embedding quote lesson, it is much easier.

This embedding quotes lesson includes a presentation for direct instruction, student materials, and even practice to help students learn this skill. This is one of the most essential high school English lessons I teach all year long.

Do your students have a hard time remembering characters and symbolism within specific stories? There is one way to keep your students’ creative side going and help them remember important details while studying for quizzes. The way to do so is to draw and cut out characters. But you first need to have your students answer some basic questions about the characters:

Before you begin the activity, ask your students these questions:

Students will do this individually so they can see how much they know about the characters. If you’d like to add in more collaboration, give students 5 minutes to answer the questions individually and then have them partner up. With their new partners, provide students with an additional five minutes to discuss the characters and continue answering the questions. If you’d like, you can then have each partner group team up with another partner group to form a group of four students. Later, as a class, you will discuss each character and write down details on the whiteboard.

After students finish answering the questions, it is then time to have students quickly illustrate the characters. It might be easier to print out outlines of people and hand them out to students to add more details themselves by only drawing the characters’ outfits and coloring them in, etc.

After collecting information, your students will draw and color, but have them write the characters’ names and title on the front, while the back is for character information. For example, if a student is beginning to draw Ponyboy from The Outsiders, the student will write Ponyboy’s name above his head. To add in even more information, the student could write “Greaser” underneath Ponyboy’s name.

It will be critical for high school students to use these character outlines because students are reading more mature stories with complex symbolic elements. For instance, if students focus on Juliet from Romeo and Juliet, they will have her name on the front with no title, since her title is her last name. Your students will write the colors symbolic to the rival families, meaning the Capulets wore blue shades while the Montagues wore red colors. Even though Romeo and Juliet wore muted tones, it will be easier to put blue or red underneath their names.

With these cut-outs of the characters, your students will be able to study better because of the added visual element! A way for them to use their drawings is by doing a memory game where students will either place the characters on their front or back and guess names or the character’s information. It will also be an excellent cheat sheet for final exams, of course, allowing students to have time in class to organize these characters in the stories they belong to by putting a ring through them or in envelopes.

Other Resources for Characterization:
Sticky Note Literary Analysis Unit

Digital Characterization Activities

In a perfect universe, students would have an infinite amount of time to read and dissect, and read and dissect, and read and dissect some more. Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect universe.

No matter whether you’re teaching middle or high school students, you’re undoubtedly aware of just how busy they can get, with the endless slew of extracurriculars and possibly even part-time jobs and family obligations.

It’s no surprise, then, that sometimes reading Chapter 12 of Jane Eyre might not be so high on their priority list. Here are some tips to help students find time for fun and productive reading within their busy schedules:

1. A good reader knows when to stop.

The impetus to keep going can sometimes be very strong even if our eyes are closing shut in defiance. The first step to finding time for productive reading is doing away with the times when it’s unproductive. For example, if a student is convinced that they absolutely must finish this chapter of Huckleberry Finn before going to bed because you, their meticulous English teacher, might be unpleased otherwise, but it is almost midnight, and they have to be awake in six hours – now might be the time to tell them that the reading can wait. Be sure to remind students that exhausted reading never gets them anywhere – it only hinders the ability to comprehend the text in front of them.

2. Plan it out.

Things can get chaotic when we’re young – sometimes we feel like we’re floundering all over the place, which adds to the uncertainty that we’ll never have adequate time for anything. Students might not like to hear this, but the most tried-and-true method to get good reading time is to schedule it. No, students do not have to go so far as adding “reading time” to their g-cal. Still, teachers can help students by teaching them time-management skills. If students set aside a certain amount of time each day (within the same time frame, if possible, in a place that they are comfortable, and free from unnecessary distractions) can truly work wonders for their reading game. Not only this, but abiding by a specific schedule or routine will relieve students’ great deal of anxiety.

3. Turn the page, then turn in.

Taking a shower, brushing teeth, and reading for half an hour each night might be a great routine to encourage students to follow. For students who feel like they hardly have time to breathe during the day, implementing a reading period as part of their nightly routine will likely prove for them to be a worry-free and relaxing endeavor. Plus, it might also help students who have a difficult time falling asleep at night. As a result, they will much more easily retain vital information from their relevant texts. Students should still be wary of their limitations, though, as mentioned earlier, and not push themselves to read at the end of a particularly tiring day when one might need to go the extra mile with half the energy.

4. During those dull moments….

In every busy day, there are still always at least a handful of dull or empty moments. Perhaps, when students are waiting for the late bus to whirl its way around the corner, or those several moments they spend scrolling through social media after flopping down on their beds. Of course, quiet moments like these are necessary for students’ and our own sanity. So, advise students to recognize those moments of transition or idleness and maybe get something, no matter how small, out of them. If students have an extra ten minutes of nothing before a meeting or practice, perhaps they can accomplish a small task during that time. Sometimes having read three pages on the bus can really put us ahead of schedule.

5. And, in case of emergency…

If a student is absolutely positive that they will not have time to read a chapter in full, there are still ways to make do with what they’ve got, and join the class with confidence and ease. For so many of our students, this might be a reality, and as teachers, we should be understanding of our students’ time outside of our classrooms. We should encourage students in these situations to highlight, or make special note of, the first and last sentences of every significant paragraph of the relative chapter, and to, if possible, skim any dialogue present. Often, this will be the body of what they’re after, even if they have to go back and savor the details for next time. We’ve all been there!

With all these tips in mind, the most important thing for students to remember is that rushed or anxious reading never did anyone good. In fact, it is probably counterproductive. Always remain flexible with the rigorous demands of students’ busy schedules and lives – in the long run, it’ll pay off for you and them alike!

While classrooms may look different this year, whether you are teaching in-person, in a hybrid setting, or entirely online, there are still ways to add personalized details to the back-to-school season. If you’re looking for information about starting the school year remotely, you might be interested in this blog post.

Here are four ways to center your classroom on the needs and interests of your students.

Creating a Student-Centered Classroom: Get to know your students.

This notion may seem obvious, but to personalize your classroom for your students, you have to know a little bit about them before starting the class. A great way to do this is to send out a back-to-school student survey at the beginning of the new school year to your students before class gets underway. If you’ve already started instruction, don’t worry. You still have time to get to know your students and their interests.

Your questionnaire can address topics from favorite books to favorite candy to favorite after-school activities. If you are teaching remotely, it also might be a great idea to survey students about their access to technology and comfort-levels of being on camera in a Zoom class.

A survey can be a great way to get a basic understanding of what your students like and don’t like, and it can help create assignments that students will enjoy. For example, if you are focusing on poetry and know that a few students like basketball and a few students shared that they love making cookies, you can group some of those students and have them work together to write a poem about that thing that unites them. This intentional grouping makes them feel like they can connect to the assignment more deeply. Plus, it shows your students that you took the time to get to know them. It also helps students to get to know other people that share the same interests.

Creating a Student-Centered Classroom: Personalized name tags and table tents

If your students are about to be back in your classroom in person, allow them to personalize their area with a nameplate that also represents who they are. If you are teaching online, encourage students to bring certain items to the Zoom classes to show off to their classmates. Yes, this might feel a bit childish, but students will reminisce about show-and-tell, and it is a great way to help build a virtual class community! In my digital Back-to-School Welcome Stations, one of the back-to-school stations is a virtual nameplate. I encourage all of my students who don’t feel comfortable having their cameras on to share their virtual nameplate instead.

Creating a Student-Centered Classroom: Incorporate students into stories

This simple teaching strategy is great when you’re working on essay-writing or editing and need some text examples. If you are about to workshop students’ essays and want to practice editing as a group, use a paragraph that you wrote incorporating students’ names and personal interests. This shouldn’t have to be mentioned but always write about students in a positive light. Avoid anything that might be misconstrued or embarrassing. The goal is to make students feel welcomed into your classroom, not alienated. (This could also be a great survey question. Do students give you permission to use their names in writing examples?) Students will get excited when they see themselves being included in the sample paragraph, and it will be more engaging to edit than a paragraph from another source.

Creating a Student-Centered Classroom: Consider students’ talents when creating assignments

If you have some freedom in choosing assignments for different units, considering students’ talents and interests is a great way to spark creativity and engagement with the class material. If you have many students interested in theater, assigning students to act out a scene would allow them to demonstrate their understanding by doing something they love to do. If you have students who love music, whether it be singing, playing an instrument, or simply listening to music, ask them to come up with a 5-song soundtrack that they think would pair well with the book you just read. If you have students interested in film, let them create a “trailer” for a book. If you have students who love art, suggest they recount their favorite part of the novel in the form of a comic strip. All of these assignments cater to students’ specific interests, but they are also an excellent way for students to demonstrate their understanding of the text through a medium they enjoy.

This will make them feel like you understand their interests and welcome their unique qualities in English assignments. If your class varies significantly in terms of hobbies and extracurricular activities, you can give all of these assignments as options. Students love when they have a choice in their assignments. If you assess on a standards-based rubric, you could have quite a few different assignment options. , and students can choose which one is the most exciting for them.

Every class will be different, as it is a different makeup of students with diverse backgrounds and varied interests and passions. This means that every classroom environment will be unique to the students inhabiting it. Personalizing your classroom, whether it be the physical space or the types of projects you assign, will help students to feel welcome and comfortable. Not every student will be excited about their English class, but incorporating these personalization ideas will help spark creativity and keep students engaged with the material.

In the public education setting, timed-writes are a required part of many standardized tests. Rather than try to cloak that reality, embrace it! One great way to do this is with fun and engaging writing warm-ups! Show your students that timed writing can be a fun challenge, and develop their expository and analytical prowess by beginning every class with a writing warm-up. These warm-ups should take only five to ten minutes, and you can easily implement them into your daily bell-ringer routine.

Here are 10 writing warm-ups  to build your students’ writing confidence:

1 Minute Story

Get your students in the habit of writing from the word “go.” Set the time for 60 seconds and task them with writing a complete short story with a beginning, middle, and end in that time. The first time, many of them will probably find themselves caught up in the pressure or struggle over what to write. That’s okay! The more they practice, the better they will become at thinking quickly and excluding any unnecessary information. By the end of the school year, an essay in forty-five minutes will seem like a piece of cake! It’s best not to score these short stories. Instead, work on progress. If a student has trouble with this, encourage them to keep adding to their story with the one-minute you give them in class.

A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words

Put an image up on the board, and have your students write a short paragraph about it. You can have them pen a short story, a long-form poem, or an explanation of what a student perceives the situation depicted to be. This exercise will encourage creative and critical thinking skills, both of which are essential in rhetorical analysis.

Note: the image should have as much or as little visual information as is appropriate for the type of response you are seeking. For example, for a poem, a picture of an apple would suffice; whereas, a stock photo of a couple might better suit a short story or analysis.

Teaching Resource: Descriptive Writing.

Musical Manuscripts

Using instrumental music is a great way to activate your students’ creativity and ability to write intuitively. Play the piece once in its entirety, and allow your students to make notes along the way. Then have them determine the mood of the song in a single word, and write a paragraph about why the song is “sad”, “happy”, “romantic”, etc. Because most of your students probably won’t yet have written a master’s thesis in music theory, this activity will force them to think analytically to get their point across. Plus they’ll get to listen to music in class!

Everyone’s A Critic

Have your students write a short review of a book, television show, or movie they recently read or watched! Reviews have a clear, if highly subjective, prompt: Was it good or bad? This warm-up is a wonderful practice for plot analysis, critical thinking, and supporting claims with evidence from the source. Plus, you may be able to avoid a bad film or two yourself. Kids are notoriously harsh critics, after all.

Alphabetical Order

This activity will make your students groan, but it will undoubtedly get them focused. This exercise will require your students to write a 26 line account of their day so far, each line beginning with the corresponding letter of the alphabet. For example: “A bird flew by my window this morning. Birds are nice. “Caw,” the bird said…” Students may experience frustration, but the structure will help them become used to producing fantastic work while working with strict guidelines. Furthermore, this activity will get them thinking about the process of writing.

Reverse! Reverse!

If you enjoy nonsensical fun, look no further! In this exercise, you will select any word out of the English language and present it to your students. Then reverse all the letters, creating an entirely new word. Each of your students will decide the meaning of this new word, and provide a dictionary entry for it, complete with a definition and an example sentence. This is a fun little exercise that gets the creative juices flowing and lets students feel more in control of language.

Tip: To make the activity more challenging, place specific guidelines on how the word fits into the English language, i.e., “this word is a verb,” etc.

Dear New Me,

Letters are a great, low-stress activity that still helps your students practice communicating their thoughts effectively in writing. In this exercise, students will write a short message to their future selves, detailing personal goals or worries about the near future. I recommend doing this at the beginning of a new unit or even before an extended assignment/project so that students can go into the next learning experience with a more focused mindset. Self check-ins are necessary and important!

Dear Old Me,

Here’s a fun mirror of the above warm-up, in which your students will write to their past selves! This can work in a broader sense, such as writing a letter full of things they’d wish they had known when they were six. They can also use this as a reflection upon the ending of a unit or project. It can even pair with the “Dear New Me” project, resulting in a constant stream of conversation that marks each student’s progress. It’s a great way to remind students that we are all learning and growing every day.

Dear Alter Ego,

Yet another twist on letter writing: This activity is one students can engage with every day and one that allows them a snippet of fantasy to liven up the classroom. Ask your students to create an alter ego for themselves. Then set aside a few minutes at the beginning of each class for your students to write to their alter egos. Not only is this an exercise in writing, but it’s also an exercise in self-esteem. Often alter egos are who we imagine ourselves as, but fear we are too plain or weak to be. The more acquainted your students become with their alter egos, the more they will realize that they are exalting themselves and their own potential.

Passion

Everything comes out better when love is added to the mix. When you ask someone about a subject they love, it seems as if they could talk for hours. Ask your students to write down a list of things they are passionate about: This can be anything from food to a sport to a stuffed animal they always keep on their bed. Have them choose one, set the timer, and let them write! They’ll surprise themselves with how much they have to say. Some more specific questions you can use to prompt them are: Why is ___ special to you personally? When did you first become interested in ___? What are 3 facts you know about ___?

A recent article in The Guardian asks the question, “Are today’s young readers turning on The Catcher in the Rye?” The short answer to this question is, yes. And the reason lies in Holden Caulfield’s lack of relatability. Holden is white, straight, male, and comes from a well-off family. Maybe Caulfield was never super relatable. Maybe part of The Catcher’s success lies in the fact that his adventure is enviable to most teenagers (running around New York city unsupervised), and that his angst, while specific to him, is relatable in a general sense to all teenagers. This post contains affiliate links which may provide me with a small kickback to help me maintain the costs of operating this website.

In the article, author Dana Czapnik argues that The Catcher in the Rye isn’t important because of Holden’s relatability but because of how masterfully Salinger portrays his imperfect protagonist. While this is a strong point, perhaps it is time to teach it in a creative writing course (or a course specifically about the art of character development). But as far as a novel that is both accessible and relatable to high school readers, what is the alternative?

There are probably countless alternatives to Catcher. In fact, Salinger’s novel Franny and Zooey is a great alternative: A) Zooey, a young woman, is the main character and B) Its themes and ideas are more mature and sophisticated without being any less accessible. An even better alternative is the National Book Award-winning novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.

The novel tells the story of fourteen-year-old Junior (Arnold) Spirit. He was born with a brain defect that, while not affecting his intelligence at all, left him with a series of physical defects, which would have made him a target for bullies while growing up. Junior is the epitome of an alienated teen. He’s alienated by the fact that he is Native American, both socially in terms of race and physically, as he and his family live on a reservation. But he is also alienated among his own people by his appearance.

The novel starts with Junior getting expelled for throwing a textbook at his teacher out of frustration. It’s the first day of ninth grade, and Junior’s “new” textbook is over thirty-years-old. Junior feels as if he’s being smacked in the face with his own poverty and throws the book accidentally breaking his teacher’s nose. The teacher approaches Junior later, and instead of scolding him, he apologizes to him for how difficult his life is and encourages Junior to get off the reservation. He talks about how Junior’s older sister was one of the brightest students he ever had but that she did nothing with her life because she stayed on the reservation. This inspires Junior to enroll in the all-white high school twenty-two miles away and pursue his dreams of getting a good education and attending college.

It’s a heartwarming and inspiring story about a kid with everything stacked against him refusing to give up. Although this novel is written at a lower reading level, the material is very mature. Alexie is completely unapologetic about what life is like for a teenage Native American living in poverty on a reservation. There is no explicit gore, but readers will be exposed to alcoholic fathers who beat their children, the frequency with which Native Americans die in alcohol related circumstances, talk of masturbation, and a lot of physical fighting.

After all, Alexie warns us in the title that this is the absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian, not the abridged diary, so these elements, though possibly disturbing for some young readers, are essential to the crafting of Junior’s character and his world.

What makes Junior a “part-time Indian” is the change that occurs in how his family, friends, and neighbors view him once he begins attending the all-white school. Suddenly, it’s as if Junior isn’t Indian enough. Some even start to resent him and call him a traitor, as if leaving the reservation in search of a better life is equivalent to leaving in search of becoming white. Alexie approaches this question very interestingly because in a certain way, Junior takes on a whiteness. At his new school, after a rough start, Junior becomes fully integrated—He gets good grades, gets picked for the varsity basketball team, and starts dating one of the prettiest most popular girls in school, which then makes him popular by association. By the end of the novel, Junior’s classmates don’t see him as the only Native American student; they simply see him as their classmate. And this raises the important question of how do we tell when acceptance and assimilation become the erasing of an identity?

Although Alexie never attempts to answer this explicitly, it’s clear he is cognizant of it. Throughout the whole novel Junior struggles with feeling torn between two worlds and two identities. Despite all of the tragedy that occurs throughout the book, it still manages to have a happy ending. One in which Junior is accepted by his friends and family for his ambitions and for leaving the reservation while also being, not only accepted, but celebrated by his white classmates. It could be argued that Alexie’s message is that culture and identity are only secondary to love and friendship, but that seems a bit vapid for someone on Alexie’s level. More likely, it’s that Alexie doesn’t see a clear answer to this question and that it’s the type of thing Junior will struggle with for the rest of his life.

This is what makes Junior such a great modern-day alternative to Holden Caulfield. By the end of Catcher, Holden had his ultimate coming-of-age moment and is satisfied with it. But by the end of Junior’s story, he’s still lost, albeit a bit more comfortable with it. And that’s a much more realistic and relatable way of approaching the conundrum of growing up—It’s never over, we’re always growing, we’re always trying to find our way.

Writing Exercises

Have students write a mock-interview with Junior. They ask the questions and they write what they believe Junior would say. It’s a great exercise, not only in writing, but in empathy.

Have students write about identity. What is it? How does one obtain it?