Why Do Teachers Assign Dark Short Stories Like The Lottery and The Yellow Wallpaper?
Last month, during fall parent-teacher conferences, I was halfway through a chocolate chip PTA cookie and scribbling a note about a student’s missing essay when Sarah, Jace’s mom, pulled her chair across the scuffed linoleum and set her son’s reading notebook on the table between us. She didn’t beat around the bush. “Jace came home upset the other day after you read that The Lottery story,” she said. “Kept saying it’s gross and scary, and I get why he’s confused. Why do you all make kids read these depressing, violent short stories anyway? He mentioned The Yellow Wallpaper and The Monkey’s Paw are next, and all of them sound… messed up.”
I didn’t blame her for asking. I had the exact same reaction when I was 15, sitting at my own kitchen table after reading The Lottery for the first time. I slammed my tattered literature textbook down and told my mom my teacher was crazy for making us read about a town that stones a woman to death just to keep a tradition going. My mom asked the same question Sarah did, right then. So I had an answer ready, one I’ve refined over seven years of teaching 10th grade English.
These stories aren’t assigned just because they’re on a list of classics, even though they are. They’re perfect for teens who are just starting to figure out that the world doesn’t work the way we told them it does when they were little. When you’re 14 or 15, you start noticing all kinds of unspoken mess no one talks about: that the rule everyone follows just because it’s always been that way can hurt someone. That adults don’t always listen when you say something’s wrong. That even when you work hard and do everything right, things can still go wrong. These stories wrap all that messy stuff up into 10, 20, 30 pages. You don’t have to commit to a 300-page novel to sit with the discomfort. It’s a small, safe test run for real life.
After we finished The Lottery in Jace’s class, we sat in a circle talking about it, and Jace was the first one to speak up. He said it reminded him of the freshman football initiation at our school, where upperclassmen make new guys do borderline humiliating stuff just to join the team, but everyone brushes it off as “team bonding.” He said his older brother did it, his dad did it when he went to school here, so no one will change it. That’s not a connection I planned for the lesson. That’s just what the story brought up for him, because it puts the question right in your face: why do we do the things we do? No sugar coating, no easy answer.
When we get to The Yellow Wallpaper next month, half the girls in class will bring up how it feels to tell your parents or doctor you’re anxious, and they just tell you to stop scrolling TikTok and go outside. The story isn’t just about a woman locked in a room 100 years ago. It’s about being unheard, which is something almost every teen feels at some point. The Monkey’s Paw, for all its spooky magic, isn’t just a ghost story. It’s about how even the wish you think will fix everything can break what you already have. It teaches that life doesn’t tie up happy endings with a bow, and learning that early, in a safe story, helps when it happens in real life.
I told Sarah there are two small things parents can do when their kid comes home upset about a story like this, instead of shutting the conversation down. The first is to swap the generic “are you okay?” for a simple line: “That story messed me up when I read it too. What part bugged you the most?” It doesn’t matter if you never read it, or don’t remember it if you did. That line opens the door instead of closing it. It doesn’t put pressure on them to say they’re fine when they’re not. The second thing is don’t rush to fix their discomfort. Discomfort is the whole point. If they’re mad or confused or sad, that means the story worked. It got them to care enough to think. You don’t have to make them feel better right away. Just let them talk.
Sarah nodded, and wrote the line down in the notes app on her phone. She said she’d been wanting to just tell Jace it’s an old story, don’t overthink it, but that made sense.
A week after the conference, Sarah sent me a two-line email. She said they tried that question at dinner, and ended up talking for almost an hour about a small, unfair tradition in their extended family that Jace had been upset about for a year, but never said anything about. They didn’t change the tradition that night, and they didn’t solve all the world’s problems, but it was out in the open now.
I still get this question at every round of conferences, from parents who just want their kid to read something that doesn’t leave them upset. I get that. No one wants their kid coming home sad over a book. But more often than not, that sad, uncomfortable feeling leads somewhere. It leads to a conversation, or a new question, or a better understanding of what’s going on in their head that they haven’t been able to name yet. There are plenty of happy, warm books out there for kids to read. The dark, tight little short stories aren’t here to scare them. They’re here to help them practice talking about the scary stuff they already see.
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