At one point in the essay to explain the full timeline he writes “Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. This essay focuses on the history of our planet and more specifically putting humanity’s time on our planet into context. Instead, let’s imagine Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1, and today being December 31 at 11:59 pm” concluding a few sentences later with “ Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 PM”. “Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. At which point is online information too much or too invasive? Is there a need for info to be controlled or to be reduced in terms of our sharing? The opening of the essay about the details which can be discovered online would open up great discussion. I might use it in my grade 9 class when we do more focused lessons on media studies. The essay culminates with a poignant story about an incident in a hospital ER when Green was doing a chaplain residency and then years later the Google search that eased his mind of that particular event. This essay focuses on how Green uses Google to search online for details about people. (I also plan to use a section from Eternity Martis’ They Said This Would Be Fun and you can read about that here.) “Googling Strangers”

I will be using this essay in the first unit of grade 12 English where we explore personal essays and students write their own. It is also an honest explanation of mental health, support systems, and coping mechanisms. Green writes of his severe depression and uses the film Harvey with Jimmy Stewart as both a motif and a touchstone throughout the essay. This very personal essay is a strong example of writing one’s experience. Here are four John Green essays that will be making their way into my classroom next year. How I will use John Green essays in the classroom And while there is some absurdity to the reviews – perhaps a lack of actual criteria for judgment – as I read through them lounging on my balcony I envisioned all sorts of ways to fit them into my classroom.

He reviews elements of our world such as Diet Dr Pepper, Canada geese, cave paintings at Lascaux, air conditioning, and so much more offering one to five stars for each item reviewed. Moving away from the fiction you may know him for – The Fault in Our Stars or Turtles All The Way Down – this book includes 44 short, pithy essays. John Green’s latest book The Anthropocene Reviewed is based on his podcast all about the Anthropocene – aka the current time in the planet’s history.

The John Green eSampler by John Green