Absurdity in my lesson plans.

 am good at taking an ordinary premise and pushing it one step too far. That is useful instructionally because absurdity makes students notice distinctions. If I am teaching inference, I don't just ask what a character probably thinks. I give them four increasingly ridiculous interpretations and make them decide where the evidence stops supporting the claim. If I am teaching theme, I let one answer be technically plausible but wildly overgeneralized. If I am teaching context clues, I make the sentence about a deeply offended tomato plant or Kevin the fern rather than another generic student walking to school.

I would also lean into my tendency to turn things into stories. Instead of "Today we are learning author's craft," the lesson becomes: "Something suspicious is happening in this chapter. Tolkien is manipulating you. Let's find out how." Then the same standards and multiple-choice questions follow, but there is a narrative problem to solve.

I could make several recurring Emma-style lesson formats:

• Take It Too Far: Start with a reasonable interpretation and keep pushing it until students identify the point where the text no longer supports it. Excellent for inference, theme, and evidence.
• Who Is Being Ridiculous? Give three fictional students' interpretations. One is strong, one is weak, and one has gone spectacularly off the rails. Students choose who has the best evidence.
• The Case of... "The Case of the Changing Bilbo," "The Case of the Suspicious Narrator," "The Case of the Terrible Evidence." Students collect clues, then answer the MC question as the verdict.
• What Would Happen If...? Change one detail and make students reason through the consequences. "If Bilbo had immediately volunteered to fight Smaug, what would that change about Tolkien's characterization?" This helps them understand why the actual authorial choice matters.
• The Wrong Answer Hall of Fame: Show an answer that sounds impressively academic but is actually unsupported. Let students diagnose what is wrong with it.
• Peanut/plant/gnome cameos: Very occasional recurring characters can make dry examples memorable. Peanut can misunderstand figurative language. A fern can object to a vocabulary word. A garden gnome can submit terrible textual evidence. The recurring joke becomes part of the course culture rather than random decoration.

My visual personality can show up too. I naturally like collage, color, odd objects, plants, maps, pictures, and little visual details. My lessons do not have to look like corporate instructional decks. A clean slide can still have one surprising image, a tiny visual joke, a "case file" stamp, an old-paper texture, a bizarre object connected to the example, or a free-standing Tolkien image. I can make the deck feel authored rather than templated.

I would also use my actual thinking style. I often ask myself things like, "Wait. What is actually happening here?" or "That makes no sense." Those are excellent student prompts. Instead of always writing formal directions, I occasionally use:

"Wait. Tolkien just changed something. What changed?"

or

"This answer sounds smart. Is it actually supported?"

or

"How far can we take this idea before it becomes nonsense?"

That last one in particular feels very much like me and teaches an important eighth-grade reading skill: interpretation has limits imposed by evidence.

My humor should also be allowed into the answer choices, but selectively. The wrong answers can be funny as long as the humor does not make the correct answer obvious. The joke should come from the situation rather than from making one distractor obviously stupid. For example, instead of a ridiculous answer like "Bilbo becomes a helicopter," I make all four answers intellectually plausible but phrase one with a slightly absurd image.

I think another part of my personality that belongs in the lessons is curiosity before explanation. I like discovering things. So rather than always telling students the concept and then asking them to apply it, I sometimes reverse it:

Notice → Guess → Investigate → Learn the term → Apply → Multiple choice.

For example, I give them three lines in which Tolkien builds suspense and ask, "What do these have in common?" Let them notice darkness, delay, uncertainty, threatening language. Then I reveal: That is author's craft being used to build suspense. They have essentially discovered the lesson before I name it.

And finally, I would not remove my personal voice from the slides. A tiny caption like "At last, a root with an actual plan," or "Kevin the fern would prefer that we move to the next row," is not wasted space if the academic material remains clear. Those bits make the course feel like somebody made it rather than a program generated it.

The design principle I would use for my lessons is:

Stable structure + strange wrapper + serious thinking.

I keep the standards, predictable slide order, multiple-choice assessment, and automatic grading. I change the framing, examples, voice, visual motifs, and reasoning problems.

That would let my students experience my personality without costing me three additional hours of preparation per lesson. And my particular strength—taking an idea to its absurd limit—could become a genuine reading strategy: "How far can the evidence carry this interpretation before it breaks?" That is actually sophisticated literary analysis disguised as messing around.