This had been my third visit to Mrs. Leadbetter’s class, so I had a bit of familiarity with a few of the students. I had been gifted the opportunity to engage in interpersonal conversation with a few of them prior to teaching them. However, even with this advantage, I still felt like a fish out of water as the dead, cold eyes of 12th grade students pierced my soul. I was informed a few days prior to my assigned teaching day that I would be teaching a bit about Macbeth. I felt a bit confident because I still remembered the core themes of the play, which I haven’t read in four years. However, I needed a refresher on the finer details and chronology of the play. Which wasn’t too difficult. I also took quick glance over the paired reading, a poem from Edgar Allen Poe. My task was to help students identify similar themes throughout each work, and think about how Shakespeare and Poe expressed said themes. Initially, I had an idea to have the students popcorn read the poem for its short length: but Mrs. Leadbetter suggested against that because 12th graders have a low probability of responding to that sort of learning. So instead of that, my partner Jarrett and I took turns reading the poem to the students. While I wasn’t reading, I paid close attention to the body language of the students. Unfortunately, many were disengaged with the reading, which I was kind of expecting because of the nature of the poem. I had a strong feeling that they would be more engaged once they were released for group work. This went on to be a correct assumption and they were rather enthusiastic to get a chance to talk amongst their friends in small groups. While the discussions weren’t entirely focused on the task at hand, they were enough for the students to circle back to talking about the material. Once they had an opportunity to discuss in small groups, we merged into one big group and Jarrett recorded their comparisons on the board. I wanted to make as much of the discussion student-led as possible and while it seemed a bit rough at first, this is the nature of this teaching style which allows for a bit of controlled “messiness”.