For three days in January, English teacher Derek Thomas took on the role of student.

He got up every morning and went to “class.” He listened as some of the country’s leading scholars introduced, read, and dissected dense pieces of literature. He wrestled with his understanding of concepts and questions like thing theory, embattled rhetorics, and the role of the black intellectual.

Except Thomas wasn’t in a class of 20 like he teaches at University High School; he was one of thousands in sessions at the 2017 MLA annual convention. Called “the largest scholarly meeting in the humanities,” the Modern Language Association annual convention that Thomas attended last month brings together teachers and scholars in the field of language and literature studies.

“As it exists as a conference, it’s basically thousands of graduate students and professors, and some secondary teachers, who present on various topics of interest to academia,” said Thomas.

Thomas had hundreds of sessions to choose from, but he narrowed it down to about a dozen. Of those, a few stood out to him.

“I went to one session on Claudia Rankine and Ta-Nehisi Coates,” said Thomas. “I’ve read Coates; I did his memoir (The Beautiful Struggle) as a summer reading option a few years ago. Alicia has taught his newest book — Between the World and Me — a couple of times. This was a session about these two black intellectuals, trying to understand what they’re up to and what is motivating them in today’s political and cultural landscape.”

That Coates’s work has been covered in University High School classes was no coincidence. Thomas intentionally sought out sessions that connected with a piece he teaches or an author he covers in his classes.  Those, he said, were some of the most memorable and professionally fulfilling to him.

In addition to the Coates/Rankine session, Thomas attended one on embattled rhetorics, a phenomenon wherein people with power co-opt the language of the disenfranchised and use it to disenfranchise them even more. One of the speakers in this session was Hua Hsu, a professor at Vassar College whose “The End of White America” essay was covered last semester in Thomas’s AP Language & Culture class.

Another session included a reading of Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You,” which Thomas teaches in Advanced English: Poetry.

“It was about this concept called thing theory,” said Thomas. “In the poem ‘Having a Coke with You,’ he pays a lot of attention to the way the Coke […] exists in between us and isn’t just an object. It has some kind of cultural status. […] That can happen in a poem or a work of art where an object can become a “thing,’ and a thing has more to it than just being an object.”

Thomas enjoyed having the time and space to think deeply about the pieces and authors he teaches, and he enjoyed this convention because it was more of a “thinking one than a practice one.” The sessions he attended will inform how he teaches these pieces to students in the future.

“It was like a recharge,” said Thomas. “It was a nice four days where I thought deeply and on a grander scale than I can when I teach ‘Having a Coke with You,’ to 11th and 12th graders, for example. I think that makes me a better teacher and makes me more interested in what I’m teaching.”