Bring What You Love: Teaching with Pop Culture, Personality, and a Little Bit of Joy
Sometimes teaching can feel like a show—you feel like you need to perform for your students, their parents, other teachers, and, especially, admin. With the inundation and pressure of curricula, standards, testing requirements, lofty literature goals, classic literature, cultural relevance, classroom management, etc. etc. etc. (and, of course, not all those things are negative at all), it can feel like there is no room for you to be you in the classroom. The person you are on the weekend—maybe one who creates meticulously organized playlists, streams reality TV like there’s no tomorrow, religiously watches F1 qualifying and race day every weekend—doesn’t really get to show up in that classroom with so many pressures.
But here’s the thing—students don’t like teachers who don’t show up as themselves. Your interests, your voice, your personality—they’re not distractions from the work, they’re essential to making everything work, and, honestly, they will make your classroom life/management/experience sooooo much better!
Some of the best teaching moments happen when you let the weird and wonderful stuff in. This is how your students realize that you’re real—you become someone they can connect to. It’s amazing when what you like lines up with what they like, but even if it doesn’t, they’ll love knowing more about you. (And, they’ll love roasting you for the things you love that they find ridiculous… bonding takes all forms).
Teaching with Personality Isn’t Unprofessional
Being a real person in your classroom isn’t unprofessional. Go watch a seasoned teacher whose students love them—they are unapologetically themselves and are genuinely having fun with their students.
You don’t need to go full influencer mode, but you also don’t have to scrub your personality out of the room to be taken seriously. The truth is, students respond when you bring your actual self into the space—your humor, your references, your weirdly specific passions. And, bonus, your teaching gets better when you’re actually enjoying it.
You don’t need to be “on trend” or try to go viral. What anyone outside of your classroom thinks doesn’t matter (except maybe admin… but they’ll love it if kids are learning!). If you're already analyzing character arcs while watching Drive to Survive, or mentally assigning poetic devices to your Spotify playlists, you’re halfway to a lesson plan. Let your brain worms go where they may and then take some of that planning time to tie them all together.
Not every reference has to land—probably most won’t at first. Not every student will care that you’re obsessed with Minecraft or that you comfort watch Avatar: The Last Airbender. But the students who care about the same things will have an invitation to get to know you better. And the ones who don’t? You modeled what it looks like to bring your interests into your work, which is a valuable lesson, and, if you keep at it, they’ll come along.
Ideas for What to Do with Your Passions
You don’t need to force anything. But if you’re already into these, you might as well use them :)
🏎 F1 Racing
Why it works: High drama, high stakes, lots of subtext. Honestly? It's Shakespeare with helmets.
How to use it:
Teach persuasive writing with a “Who’s the GOAT?” debate.
Compare media coverage of drivers—bias, tone, credibility.
Break down the structure of a race like it’s a plot diagram.
Bonus: The rivalry dynamics are basically a ready-made character analysis lesson.
🎧 Spotify Culture
Why it works: Teens and teachers alike are building emotional timelines with playlists.
How to use it:
Create playlists for a character, a theme, or even a whole novel.
Use lyrics to introduce poetic devices (Taylor Swift alone could cover most of them).
If you’re brave, let students analyze your playlists to make inferences about you!
Bring in songs that feel like the setting of the story.
Bonus: You can reveal your own “Top 5 Songs to Grade Papers To” playlist.
🎮 Gaming: Cozy & Competitive
Why it works: World-building, strategy, storytelling. Whether you’re playing Stardew Valley or Valorant, you’re navigating systems and choices.
How to use it:
Design a game based on the novel you’re reading—characters, quests, consequences.
Talk about choice-driven narratives and multiple endings.
Use gaming as a research subject and have students analyze all the literary elements that you’ve been working on all year in their favorite game.
Use cozy games to explore aesthetic storytelling and atmosphere.
Bonus: Let students pitch their dream game in a creative writing mini-project.
📺 Reality TV & Streaming Drama
Why it works: It’s character-driven, emotionally messy, and full of genre tropes. In other words—perfect for English class.
How to use it:
Teach satire, performance, or unreliable narrators through shows like Love Is Blind or The Traitors.
Have students rewrite scenes as monologues or flip POVs.
Discuss editing choices and how they shape audience perception.
Bonus: You can finally admit you’ve been watching reality TV as a narrative case study all along.
📚 BookTok & Fandom Culture
Why it works: Students are reading—just not always what’s on the syllabus.
How to use it:
Offer independent reading choices from BookTok favorites. OR teach a BookTok fave. I have a full, ready to go unit for Red Rising, which is a slam dunk with high schoolers.
Pair a popular YA book with a canon text and compare themes.
Build in creative responses like fan fiction or character social media accounts.
Bonus: I have a free fan fiction creative writing freebie you can use with any novel—you’ll be surprised how much literary analysis shows up when students get to build their own story worlds.
Your Joy Is a Teaching Tool
Teaching takes a lot out of you—your time, your energy, your brain, your snacks. So if there’s something that brings you joy, why not let it into the classroom?
When you teach in a way that feels like you, it is 100% easier to show up every day. This doesn’t mean you have to turn every unit into a deep-dive on your latest hyperfixation (sometimes mock testing can feel like a break… I know—take the wins where you can!). But you’re allowed to let your interests shape the tone and rhythm of your class. You’re allowed to find it fun.
Students can tell when you care, which makes everything easier.
Start small! Reference something you love during a writing example. Design a warm up exercise that uses a trending audio. Fill your classroom library with books that you would actually read (within reason of course). Students notice more than we think and everything adds up to make you feel like a real person to them.
For more on why this is important, check out my post about True Connection in the Classroom.
If you’re looking for an easy entry point, my free creative project menu is a low-stakes way to bring fun, art, performance, and student choice into any text you're teaching, while still building literary analysis.
This Is Your Classroom Too
You don’t have to be the version of a teacher you saw growing up. You don’t have to be neutral or trend-proof or perfect. You can be curious, specific, quirky, and original. You can bring your playlists, your obsessions, your sports takes, your fandom energy—and still run a focused, rigorous, thoughtful class.
Make your classroom a space you actually want to spend time in. If you’re into aesthetics (read: dark academia), grab my dark academia literary elements poster set or the light academia literary elements poster set I designed with that exact vibe in mind—clean, academic, and just a little romantic.
Your classroom doesn’t need to be a performance. It can be a space that reflects who you are and what lights you up—and invites students to do the same.