We've all been there. You walk into a class, unveil your lesson plan with all the joy and care of a museum curator lifting the veil on a new Van Gogh, and your students just... don't care. They've got their own problems. Their own stresses. They decided in 4th grade they didn't like reading. In 5th grade that they "weren't creative." In 7th grade that they needed to give serious attention to social media if they wanted to stay cool. And now they're sitting in your class, eyes not-so-subtly glued to the little glowing screen under their desk or the clock above your MLA poster display. So what do you do? In today's podcast, I'll share five different paths you might take to help them tap back into ELA. Choose your favorite, connect the dots on two or three, or try them all. Focus on Connection One way to chip away at apathy is to focus on connecting with students on a personal level. Maybe you come up with fun nicknames for kids you're trying to gently attract back into the ELA sphere. Maybe you make it to some sports games and get to talking with your student-athletes about the season. Maybe you work on some templates for positive notes home, and you send a slew of them every week. Maybe you do some serious student surveying about their interests, past reading lives, favorite types of projects, favorite EVERYTHING, so you can keep their personalities and histories in mind as you design curriculum. When you focus on connection, you help student start to feel more at home in class and more interested in paying attention. The relationships you have with kids can help them overcome their apathy, often in connection with some of the other strategies we're talking about today. One of the quickest, easiest ways to get started with relationship building in my experience is to use Attendance Questions. This quick five minute activity for the start of class is an automatic point of connection with every student. Whether you go with silly or serious questions, you give every student a chance to tell you something about themselves. You can grab three weeks of fun questions to get started for free right here.  Incorporate Student Interests in your Work whenever you Can I was reminded of how crucial student interests can be last year when I interviewed C.J. Reynolds about enjoyable classroom management strategies. He shared his wish that his teachers could have explained the hero's journey to him in terms of the movies he was loving as a teen, and how quickly that would have helped him understand it. C.J. tries hard to keep a handle on the T.V. shows, movies, Manga, etc. that his students love so that he can build it into class content and assignments, and ask kids about it in the in-between times. It's a strategy worth trying. Might your students be excited about writing argument practice about the One Chip Challenge? Might they enjoy analyzing the tone in Taylor Swift Songs? Might they look up in shock when you reference the crazy trend their favorite Tik-Toker just started as you move into your rhetorical analysis unit? Incorporating your students' interests anywhere and everywhere you can will help you build relationships with them (which we already talked about!) and it can also help you reel them in to be more interested in the work. A kid who dreams of being a Youtuber might be a lot more interested in creating a video documentary about a local change-maker than about writing a research paper about a historical changemaker. And you can build in a whole lot of the same skills... Ride your Choice Reading Program to Better Relationships and Motivation As an introvert, it wasn't always easy for me to chat with my students between periods. I wasn't the teacher out in the hall cracking jokes and inventing hilarious nicknames. But once I started working seriously on my choice reading program, it became a major vehicle for helping me connect with my students and motivate them more across all of our class