A Real Classroom Tour (Mess Included) + My Favorite Memoir Activity
I almost didn't film this classroom tour. My floor was gross. There was a mystery box in the corner. A hamper from home had migrated to my classroom and decided to stay. I had a power strip sitting on top of a pile of student blankets that I absolutely needed to deal with before I left.
And then I stopped myself. Because the whole point is that my classroom looks like yours. I share things on social media that are polished and intentional, and that's real - but so is the mess. Both are true at the same time. So here's the tour, in full, with all the good, bad, and the ugly.
Plus, I'm sharing one of my favorite memoir unit openers of all time. It uses Vogue Magazine's “73 Questions” series and it builds community in a way that no icebreaker I've ever done has managed to match.
The classroom tour - highlights
A few things worth noting as you watch the tour:
The mirror by the door - I put it there for students. Teenagers like the mirror. I like the mirror. Let's just be honest with ourselves.
The cart by the door - Hall pass, wipes, hand sanitizer, period supplies, Band-Aids, masks. Everything students might need without having to ask. Normalizing access to basic supplies matters.
The contact paper cabinets - Storage cabinets covered in textured contact paper. They look intentional. They took one afternoon and one episode of Smartless. The whole area is now a standing-height workspace where students who need a break from sitting can work comfortably.
The seating - Flexible, but not as flexible as it once was. Nine tables, three actual chairs, floor pillows, and a standing bar. By October, behavior was driving us toward a seating chart - Post-its in different colors for different class periods until students learned their spots.
The mess - Yes, my desk is buried. Half is grading I'm getting to tomorrow. Half is stuff for absent students. The rest is things I'm not ready to deal with and that's okay. It does not make me a better or a worse teacher. Repeat that back to yourself.
The 73 Questions memoir activity
Here's the one I really want you to steal…
We were opening a memoir unit using Born a Crime by Trevor Noah — his memoir about growing up mixed-race in apartheid South Africa. I needed a gateway activity that would introduce the memoir genre in a way that felt organic and got students genuinely talking. Not a worksheet. Not a quiz. Something that built community authentically without feeling like a synthetic icebreaker — because I am allergic to traditional icebreakers.
Enter Vogue's 73 Questions series... If you haven't seen it, it's a celebrity interview format where a Vogue correspondent follows a celebrity through their home, asking 73 rapid-fire questions. There are dozens of them on YouTube and the Vogue website - 73 Questions with Adele, Jennifer Lawrence, Serena Williams, and many more.
Here's what students did:
Chose one 73 Questions video to watch from a curated list (enough variety that everyone could find someone they were interested in).
Analyzed the format: What makes this feel like a memoir? What does it reveal about the subject? What questions got the most interesting answers?
Used the format as a model to draft their own 73 Questions - about themselves - which then became the entry point into their own memoir writing for the unit.
What I didn't anticipate: how much students would love it. I expected to draw engagement out of them. Instead I had to slow them down. The activity builds community organically — students are watching real people answer real questions, and then turning that lens on themselves. It doesn't feel like an icebreaker. It feels like the beginning of something real.
This activity came out of the Brave New Teaching memoir workshop, which I mention in the video. Watch the full video for the complete walkthrough of both the classroom tour and the activity setup.
Want to build a full memoir unit around activities like this?
BNT University's WKSP 305: Teaching Biography & Memoir is a genre-specific intensive workshop that gives you ready-to-deliver ideas, lessons, and solutions for memoir and biography units at any level. And LIT 108: The Design Studio teaches you how to deconstruct and rebuild a traditional unit using modern inquiry - exactly the process behind this unit.
