A recent ninth-grade class at Charlotte Latin School taught by Daniel Hayes started with some quick grammar exercises, featured students presenting short scenes they’d written based on lines of Shakespearean dialogue, and then landed on a discussion of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Hayes discussed various approaches to staging the play and how directorial choices can illuminate different themes, contrasting Roman Polanski’s 1971 film version with the 2001 movie Scotland, PA, which sets the action at a fast-food restaurant. 

Hayes teaches English composition and literature to ninth and tenth graders with the enthusiasm of a teenager telling you about his favorite band. In his classroom on the top floor of the Inlustrate Orbem Building, one wall has art by the graffiti provocateur Banksy, while the opposite wall, featuring a pillar covered in dark green artificial turf, showcases a sign in the shape of a book emblazoned with the word “OPEN.” Sitting in that classroom during a free period, Hayes explains, “I like the idea of open your books, open your minds, open your hearts.” 

Are there other teachers in your family?

No, I broke the mold. I didn’t know what I wanted to study in college, so I asked my dad, who said, “Well, the world runs on business.” So I was a business major, but when I was taking microeconomics and accounting classes, I didn’t enjoy it. I resented the smell of the textbooks. I started thinking of myself in a cubicle and I thought I hate this. I had an existential crisis and I sat down to examine, well, what do I enjoy doing? Even as a kid, when I learned to tie my shoes, I wanted to go tell someone else how to do it. Or when I saw a movie, I’d want to go see it again with friends so I could take them on the ride. So I changed everything and applied for the English education program.

I was reading this book called Blue Like Jazz, and in the foreword, the author [Donald Miller] talked about how he was watching a street performer playing saxophone outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland, Oregon. He said that he watched the guy for fifteen minutes, and the saxophonist never opened his eyes. He hadn’t enjoyed jazz before that. But he wrote, “After that, I liked jazz music. Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they’re showing you the way.” I had never articulated it that way, but that’s how I live my life. Passion itself doesn’t sell everything, but it can get kids excited. There’s showmanship in teaching, which doesn’t mean insincerity: it means modeling that enthusiasm.

How do you communicate that passion to your classes?

I start the year a little slower than some teachers, because I believe learning is socially constructed. For me, it’s missing the mark to start on day one saying, “Here’s your syllabus and here’s the rules of conduct.” As teachers, we’re eager to get to know our students, but I’m just as eager for them to get to know me: I think vulnerability begets vulnerability, so I model that for them. I do something called the Hayes Hot Seat: I tell them, “Ask me a question, but make it a real question.” I still get “What’s your favorite color?” — I’ll try to say something poetic about the pinks of the sunset, but that doesn’t elicit a great story. 

But I’ve had kids ask powerful questions like “What do you do when you’re sad?” Someone will always ask a question about my tattoos, and I’ll say as much as I can, so it won’t turn into 15 questions about my tattoos. I’m laying a foundation: after I’ve told my stories, I reverse the script and ask the students to interview each other. It instills the idea of asking good questions and teasing out answers from a novel. I always tell them about my brother, who has a disability, and how much that shaped who I am. Do you know the famous six-word short story attributed to Ernest Hemingway?

“For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.”

When I write a six-word memoir on the board, it’s “My brother cannot speak. I can.”

Is the notion of interrogating a text new to your students?

For some students it’s new, but I think interrogation of anything you’re interested in is natural. Students in ninth grade need concrete models, so I made some slides explaining TP-CASTT for poetry [an analytic acronym for Title, Paraphrase, Connotation, Attitude, Shifts, Title, and Theme]. But as a teacher, I prefer to say, “I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Almost every poem you read is going to have a shift: in tone, in content, or in perspective.” If I present that insight as “you’re inside the club with me,” that’s much more effective than memorizing TP-CASTT.

You’re interested in Baudrillard and literary theory. Are those ideas too heady to communicate to high-school students?

I find that as we go up the intellectual or academic hierarchy, we become more protective about trying to give credit in the right places: this is the person who originated this thought and this is the terminology that encapsulates it. That’s a good thing, but kids are not really interested in that. They care about big ideas and philosophies — they don’t care about philosophers. If you don’t get concerned with terminology, you can tell them a story about ideas that engages them.

I’ve been teaching for 13 years, and every year there will come a point where we’re having a deep conversation, and I’m proud of this ninth or tenth grade class for the connections they’re making. Then a kid who’s enjoying it will raise their hand and say something very similar to this: “Mr. Hayes, this is wild. Have you ever thought about this? You look at a color and say it’s orange. And I say it’s orange, but what if we’re seeing something different?” It’s always a color, and it’s always about the interpretation of that color. As we start to become our own philosophers, we realize that we have our constructs of reality. 

How are you a better teacher now than when you started?

I don’t know that I am. Well, in some ways I’m a lot better. I’m smarter, and I continue to read, and my time management has improved. Over the years, you figure out the perfect way to communicate a complex idea, and you write it down and make it a handout, or you internalize it and you’re able to say it more clearly. But I don’t know if that translates into students understanding it better. When I was younger, less polished and less efficient, I might say something sloppily and say “Does this make sense to you?” And the student and I would wrestle with the idea. Ironically, as I get more efficient, I’m less confident in the idea of efficiency.

Anything worth doing takes time. To become a good writer, you have to make mistakes and struggle through it. The beauty of that laborious process is that writing is a means of discovery. My gripe with AI is that it’s the great shortcut — it’s the flattener of the productive struggle. 

Why do we do literary analysis?

Because fiction contains truths that are sometimes truer than reality.