High School English teacher, Brianna May, is new to Poly Prep this year and is planning to teach an English elective in the upcoming year. May described her experience at Poly as “really delightful,” as “kids are just nice to each other here, more so than in other schools I’ve worked at.” May loves teaching English because she gets “to read the most beautiful literature and discuss it with teenagers, which is a really beautiful sweet spot because [they] are not fully formed in the best way. [Teenagers] are still so open to other perspectives and really thoughtful about it.” This passion for English has led May to teach the advanced elective next year that is titled “What is Love.” The elective is going to be offered to 11 and 12th graders.
“The most important thing that drives humanity is love,” May said, when asked about the course. She explained that the course “is aimed to expose teenagers to all forms of love, beautiful, perverse, so that they can define boundaries and imagine what love really should be.” May believes that “the job of a humanities teacher is not so much to teach” as it is to get students “ to think about how to live life” as they “experience other people’s mistakes” and “triumphs” through many different forms and pieces of literature. Students who take the class will leave with an “undergirding for when they go off and become loving adults, when they get their own partners, when they become parents, when they decide what their religion should be, if any.” In other words, students will learn “how to love.”
“What is Love” is an advanced elective. May explained that she “actually thought it was going to be a normal elective and not an advanced elective.” She wanted it to be a normal elective because she doesn’t think the topic “should be gatekeeped” since students should be able to take the classes that they are interested in. May believes that the reason why the school made the class advanced is because the reading load is pretty heavy. Students of the class will be reading four books in one semester which means they have to be pretty quick and “thoughtful readers to get through the reading load.” One such novel is “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker. May said she “probably would not be a teacher if I had not read that book.” It made her want to “live life with more justice, more integrity, and more spirituality.” Despite the amount of work this elective calls for, May still wishes it was a normal elective.
If May could have one well-known person from pop culture join her elective for a day, she would choose Taylor Swift because of her heavy emphasis of love in her music. She told The Polygon that her songs are “about her relationships with other people, her relationship with her work, her relationship with herself.” So why is the singer so successful? “Maybe it’s because she is writing about a topic that is so important to our humanity,” May noted. May believes that love is an important part of our world which is why she is excited to teach students more about the topic.
Overall, May believes this elective will allow students to expand their minds as they learn how to love in a way that’s “kind to themselves and to other people.”
