Background
After teaching seventh-grade English for five years, this year, I will be teaching high school English for the first time since my student teaching experience. This coming year, I will be teaching at the same school in which I student-taught, which also happens to be where the majority of my former middle school students attend high school. Therefore, I pretty much already know where my students come from, and may already know them personally. My students live in the south side of Richmond, Virginia, which remains a deeply segregated city with very little funding for its most vulnerable students. The majority of my students are African American or Latinx and many of them live either on or adjacent to Jefferson Davis Highway (Jeff Davis or J-D, for short) without knowing that they are living on a road named for the slave-owning President of the Confederate States.
This year, I will be teaching ninth and tenth grades, but I am writing this unit for my ninth grader students. However, this unit can be easily modified to meet the standards of ninth-twelfth grades. I do know that I will face many of the same impediments to teaching and learning that I experienced while teaching middle school, and I know many of the rising ninth graders because I taught them when they were in seventh grade. This year will likely be even more challenging, as some of the more ambitious and intellectually curious students are slated to attend magnet schools instead of their zone school. The majority of my students hate reading and writing unless it is short and written by a peer on any social media they can access via their smartphones. A unit about identity is especially compelling as they begin their first year of high school.
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