I did not plan on teaching middle school. When I enrolled in the UChicago English PhD program in 2008, I wanted to be an English professor—probably at a research university, where my career would rise or fall based on articles and books. But academia is fickle, and life happens, so after a few years as a Humanities teaching fellow at UChicago, and then as a writing teacher at Avenues: The World School in New York City, I found myself teaching sixth-to-eighth grade English at a small private school in Park City, Utah.

The experience was transformative. UChicago had trained me for the life of the mind, but Park City Day School’s identity was grounded in outdoor education. In addition to helping students grow as readers and writers, I found myself leading hikes in the mountains above Park City, embarrassing myself on Nordic skis, and snowshoeing up a frigid canyon, a sled behind me and a pack on my back, guiding students toward a small backcountry yurt.

Being asked to ski and snowshoe as part of my job gave me some increased fitness and new ways to spend money at REI. Having sole responsibility for the middle school English curriculum also pushed me: it made me think in new ways about the humanities. My UChicago education had taught me that reading, writing, and discussion were the means by which we reflect on and develop the capacities that make us human. Working with middle schoolers at Park City Day (and now at Rowland Hall in Salt Lake City, where my wife is an administrator and our daughter is in first grade) highlighted the foundational importance of these capacities—but also their extraordinary insufficiency when it comes to helping young people make meaning out of what they do in the classroom.

This was the first time I’d worked with sixth-through-eighth graders exclusively, and the first time I had been asked to develop curricula for those grade levels on my own. The first weeks were rocky. Most teachers develop a kind of muscle memory for classroom routines that makes managing students second nature. I realized almost immediately that my teacher muscles had been trained on high schoolers: jokes that landed with 10th graders threw seventh and eighth graders off track for minutes on end; tasks that older students could complete on their own required an array of planners and graphic organizers and checklists; students’ use of things like capitalization, punctuation, and even paragraphs was idiosyncratic or worse.

Little by little, I recalibrated my sense of how to run a classroom full of adolescents, but it wasn’t until our second unit of the year that I stumbled across an insight that would change my approach to teaching in general. It started out as a seeming disaster. I left a group of sixth graders—wild even by the standards of sixth graders—unsupervised for almost 15 minutes. I’d been talking to a colleague and, in a school with no bells, I completely lost track of time. Realizing the gravity of my error, I rushed back across the building, my mind filled with thoughts of raucous students and fellow teachers’ angry glares, only to find my usually wild group of 12-year-olds working intently on their unit project: they were creating Minecraft maps of the fantasy novels we’d been reading together.

I wish I could say that the Minecraft project was the product of my own pedagogical brilliance, but the credit goes to my former students, who had looked at my proposed assignment and decided they could do better. I had organized the year’s curriculum as a series of genre studies, pairing each genre with a literary element—in this case, setting. I asked students to pick either Nnedi Okorafor’s Zahrah the Windseeker or Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah and the End of Time and make maps of the novels’ fantasy worlds to better understand how setting and character work together.

The idea didn’t land as well as I thought it would. There were puzzled expressions and some blank stares, until one of the students, a competitive figure skater with a talent for direct feedback, suggested that a better idea might be to use the game Minecraft instead of markers and paper. From that point on, I was almost redundant in the classroom. Students who normally struggled with focus—especially a boy we’ll call Mac, who, like a lot of sixth-grade boys, reminds one of a Jack Russell puppy in human form—suddenly found new meaning in their books.

Both novels posed special challenges to mapping: Zahrah the Windseeker features a vast bushland that defies the spatial logic of the everyday world; Aru Shah and the End of Time includes similarly confounding episodes of cross-dimensional travel. I had a hard time picturing these spaces in my efforts at Minecraft making, but my students were undeterred. They dove into detailed close readings of their books, taking careful notes on setting and how it related to character, and then spent hours at school and at home translating what they’d read into intricately detailed Minecraft worlds. At the end, each student presented their map in class, explaining how they’d translated what they read into their digital constructions, and turned in an essay about how making their map deepened their understanding of the book.

This project was not without its critics, especially certain parents who regarded Minecraft as lacking the intellectual merits of something like an essay. But this assignment is a good example of how conventional understandings of rigor can get in the way of student learning. I certainly could have leaned on seminar discussions, quizzes, and essays as a means of asking students to think about setting. It may have worked for some of them. But it would not have worked for all of them, and the intensity with which students engaged in this particular task might have been lost.

In listening to the presentations, I was struck by how carefully they’d examined their novels and how thoroughly they’d rendered them in their digital worlds. Many of us are accustomed to understanding skills like close reading only in terms of writing and discussion. What the Minecraft project showed me as a teacher is that close reading need not be so narrowly prescribed. In my students’ creations, I was looking at close reading—nuanced and detailed, perhaps more than anything they would have developed through writing or discussion alone.

I’ve created several projects alongside students over the past few years of teaching. Almost every time there’s at least one moment when they become so invested that they scarcely need my guidance. To be sure, there are low moments too, when students spin their wheels and waste their time and turn in hastily crafted work at the last minute. It wouldn’t be middle school otherwise.

Such is the risk that comes with giving students the freedom to decide what all the reading and writing we do day in and day out in school means to them. Sometimes they fail, but they often succeed. I take pride in the progress my students make as writers throughout middle school, and especially in how much more engaged most get at discussing the books we read together. But little brings more joy to this teacher than encountering something like their wonderfully captured Minecraft worlds—moments when they bring our group discussions into conversation with a medium that is meaningful to them. It’s not necessarily the humanities as I learned to understand them throughout my own education. But it might be the humanities we need.

Brady Smith, AM’09, PhD’15, teaches eighth-grade English at Rowland Hall in Salt Lake City.