Alan Becker strides into his Junior Honors English classroom with a confident gait and a thoughtful mien. He’s had multiple roles at Charlotte Latin School since he arrived as an English teacher in 1997, including stints as the head coach of the Varsity Cross-Country team and the head of the educational technology department. He also took three years off after his son was born in 2004 so that his wife could keep working as a family-practice physician. “My kids are both Latin lifers,” he says. “I’ve been here a long time, but I always say my goal is to stay at Latin.” In the 2023-24 school year, Becker was honored with the Upper School Inlustrate Orbem Award and cited as “a master teacher of clear, concise writing and careful, observant reading.”

How did you decide that you wanted to be a teacher?

I grew up in upstate New York, outside a city called Utica. My summer job for six years was leading teenagers on bicycle tours: we carried our tents on the bikes and rode around New England for three or four weeks. And I did some where we rode around Canada and Europe. We needed our passports, but nobody was threatened back then by some people on bicycles. For a few years after college, I worked in a Manhattan law firm as a paralegal. I was thinking about going to law school, but I decided I liked working with teenagers more than I wanted to sit in a law office.

Do you have a favorite book to teach?

It’s probably The Great Gatsby. It unfolds nicely in the classroom, students invariably enjoy it, and it’s kind of timeless in its relevance. It offers endless layers of material: you can talk about the American dream, but you can also place it in the modern art movements of the early 1920s or discuss its female characters in a way that people wouldn’t have back then.

How do you know when you’re connecting with a student?

The classic way is that a student will stop after class to follow up on an idea, or show up before class and say, “Mr. Becker, we were up all night talking about this.” The novel we’re currently studying is Kindred [by Octavia Butler] and it’s generating some of that response: they want to play with the ideas that we’re talking about and extend them.

The other way that English teachers get to know students is through their writing. I can ask for an analytical essay, which is more formal and shows me how sharp their minds are, but at different junctures I ask for something that’s a little more creative and personal, and they can share something they really care about. There are students who are silent but who have a rich internal life.

Have students ever made you look at a work of literature differently?

All the time — that’s one of the great things about teaching English.

What was the best book you read this summer?

The Gangster We Are All Looking For, by the Vietnamese-American author lê thị diễm thúy. I inherited it in a stack of my books from my predecessor, who taught the junior English course before me: it was an optional read last year. I liked it so much that it’s going to be a mandatory unit this year. It’s a very cleverly written story of the experiences of a young Vietnamese immigrant moving to the West Coast. Each of the five sections is about a different phase in this narrator’s integration into America: there are some symbols she uses to convey things that she didn’t fully understand when she was eight or 11 or 14, but she begins to understand when she’s 18 or 25.

How do you determine the order in which your students read books?

I’m teaching a class right now that is chronological: the junior year in English is an American literature year. Some teachers here have done it differently, but think it helps students understand something about the American identity if one era builds on another. I also like to do a thematic build: if we’re talking about works that display moral courage, the works themselves might be from different timeframes and different parts of the world, but perhaps the progression is that the acts of moral courage become more significant and people take greater risks in pursuit of their goals. Another classic approach is to organize by complexity. Contemporary literature can be abstract and fragmented. It can make no sense until you read it four or five times — sometimes students say it will never make sense. So we start with something accessible and then scaffold up the complexity. 

How are you a better teacher now than when you arrived at Latin?

When you’re new to a school, you’re desperately focused on getting through the day and understanding the day’s lesson. It takes a few years to know the daily lessons well enough to balance them with the bigger picture. The other thing is that teenagers can be fractious, but I rarely take anything personally anymore. As long as I get a good night’s sleep and enough caffeine in the morning, I’m good to go. 

I went to my 25th college reunion a while back, and some of these people were so steeped in the adult business world. I’m used to a dialogue with teenagers: sports and the media they’re consuming and their struggles with schoolwork. The teenagers’ lives feel more authentic to me — that’s just where I live. Teenagers are still trying to figure out life; there’s an honesty with them that makes conversation with them refreshing, if at times a little frustrating.

How did you start playing guitar?

In high school, I was big into sports, but one year, I had appendicitis. Back then, they really cut you open, so my sports season ended midyear. I asked for a guitar so I would have something to do while I was sitting at home, and I’ve played ever since.

Who are your guitar heroes?

Oh, we’re going to be here for a while. Jimi Hendrix had a way of twisting and jumping, a turn of phrase in the notes that was just a little outside the usual blues box. Eric Clapton was great, but a notch down from Hendrix. I liked Mark Knopfler when I was younger: some of my first records were Dire Straits records. And Neil Young — I saw him when he was on tour this spring with Crazy Horse.

I share Bob Dylan in the classroom. He won a Nobel Prize for Literature, so I’m allowed to do that now: thank you, Nobel committee. I put lyrics for certain songs on the screen and I sing it, and I ask questions about what’s going on. “All Along the Watchtower” is very famous, but a lot of people never think about what the heck that song’s about. I really like “I Shall Be Released”: that may be his best true poem. And I play the classics for my classes, like “Blowin’ in the Wind”: along with American literature, you get a little cultural knowledge.

What’s the best advice you ever got?

“Class time is precious.” I try not to waste it: I teach bell to bell, even though we don’t have bells.