Why Do Teachers Assign Dark Short Stories Like The Lottery? A Teacher Explains
Last month, I sat across from my 10th grader Lila’s English teacher after back-to-back parent conferences. The small room smelled like old copier paper and the peppermint tea Ms. Henderson sipped from a chipped mug, and a stack of student essays covered half her desk, one topped with a neon cat sticker someone had left her. I’d come because Lila had stormed home from school three days earlier, dropped her backpack on the kitchen table hard enough to slosh my coffee, and asked why anyone would make her read a story about a woman locked in a room going crazy. “It’s just sad and creepy,” she’d said. “Can’t we read something fun?” I remembered feeling the same way about The Monkey’s Paw when I was her age, so I wanted to ask: why these stories?
Ms. Henderson leaned back, pulled a cracked, coffee-stained copy of The Lottery from her bookshelf, and said she gets this question at least once a semester. Last year, a dad pulled her aside after open house, upset that The Monkey’s Paw had given his 9th grader nightmares for three straight nights. He said it was too violent, too pointless, why teach stuff that scares kids?
Most of the stories kids read before high school have clear lines, she explained. Good guys win, bad guys lose, the problem gets fixed by the last chapter. These stories don’t do that. In The Lottery, there’s no evil villain twisting everyone’s arm. It’s just a group of normal people in a small town doing the thing they’ve always done, because that’s how it’s always been done. No one stops to ask why, until it’s too late. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the “bad guy” isn’t even really the husband locking her up. He thinks he’s helping her. He just doesn’t listen when she says she’s sick. That’s the point.
I asked if it was really just to make kids uncomfortable. She laughed and said that discomfort is the whole point. Kids grow up hearing that hard problems have clear answers, that if you do everything right, everything will work out. These stories force them to sit with messiness. When Lila reads that the woman in the wallpaper can’t get out, she doesn’t have to like it. But she feels what it’s like to be ignored, and that sticks more than any lecture about gender bias or mental health.
When I asked what parents can do at home if their kid comes home upset, she had a straightforward answer. The first mistake parents make is brushing it off. They say “it’s just an old story, don’t get so worked up” or “it’s good for you, just finish the assignment.” That shuts down the conversation before it starts. Instead, she tells parents to do two simple things: first, let them complain. If they hate the story, let them say why, don’t argue that it’s a classic. Second, ask one simple question: “What part bugged you the most, and why?” That’s it. You don’t need an English degree to talk about it. You just need to listen.
I went home that night and tried it with Lila. We were folding laundry after dinner, I brought up The Yellow Wallpaper and asked the question. She stopped folding a hoodie and said the part that bugged her most was when everyone just wrote off the main character as dramatic, even when she knew something was wrong. That bugged her, she said, because last year when she was skipping lunch and crying in the bathroom over group drama, I kept telling her it was just teen stuff, she was overreacting. I didn’t listen.
We sat quiet for a minute after that. Then she said she gets why the story matters, even if it’s still creepy. Then she mentioned The Lottery, which they were starting the next week. She said a girl in her class was talking about how their friend group has this unspoken thing where they don’t sit with the new kid at lunch. No one voted to do it, it just started, and no one talks about changing it. That’s just what they do, she said. It’s kind of like the lottery, isn’t it?
That stopped me. I’d read that story twice in school, and I always thought it was just about big, abstract problems. I never connected it to something as small and everyday as lunch room drama. But Lila saw it in her own life, right there. That’s the point, isn’t it?
Last week, Lila turned in her essay on The Yellow Wallpaper. Ms. Henderson sent it home with a note scrawled at the bottom: “This is why we read these.” Lila wrote about how the story taught her that it’s okay to say when you’re not okay, even when everyone tells you you’re fine. She wrote that it also taught her to listen when other people say that, too.
I still get why parents worry. These stories aren’t warm, they aren’t comforting, they don’t end with everyone holding hands and learning a neat little lesson. Some kids still have nightmares, some kids hate them, and that’s okay. You don’t have to love every story you read in school to learn something from it.
I don’t think this answers every question. If my kid came home every day upset by every story they read, I’d probably push back too. But for right now, it works. Lila’s still talking about these stories weeks after she finishes them, she’s connecting them to the stuff that matters to her, and that’s more than I can say for most of the books I read in high school that I forgot the second I turned in the final. These stories don’t let you forget them. That’s why teachers keep assigning them.
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