BY MICHELLE KEY
PUBLISHER
AUBURN — For Davis Thompson, teaching Shakespeare has never been simply about helping students understand an old play.
It has been about helping them understand themselves.
That philosophy — and nearly three decades of bringing Shakespeare, poetry and literature to life for students — has earned the longtime Auburn High School English teacher the 2026 Parr Shakespeare Prize.
“Honestly? It means everything to me,” Thompson said. “I love Shakespeare, I love students — and I love connecting those two worlds together through teaching.”
Thompson traces his own love of Shakespeare to his father, who took him to see his first Shakespeare play, “The Taming of the Shrew,” at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 1987.
“To be honored now, after 28 years of teaching Shakespeare, feels like thanking my father for all the sacrifices he made for me in my life, and I only wish he could see me now,” Thompson said.
The Parr Shakespeare Prize recognizes outstanding teachers who bring Shakespeare’s works to life for their students. Thompson is scheduled to be honored in January in Palm Beach, Florida, and will receive a $10,000 prize.
For Terry Ley, a former Auburn University professor of English Education who taught Thompson while he was earning his master’s degree, the recognition is fitting.
Ley said he remembers Thompson as “an excellent, imaginative and thoughtful young man” whose work he always looked forward to reading or hearing.
After teaching at Montgomery Academy, Thompson came to Auburn High School more than 30 years ago. During his career there, he has taught Advanced Placement English, chaired the International Baccalaureate program and served as department chairman.
Each year, Ley said, Thompson teaches a Shakespeare play being produced by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and arranges for his students to attend — and critique — the performance.
Ley said Thompson shared with him the essays he submitted as part of his Parr Prize application.
“They glowed,” Ley said. “It is easy to understand why the judges chose to reward him.”
Ley said the essays reflected Thompson’s joy in teaching and helped explain why his students respond so strongly to his encouragement to read, discuss, write and think for themselves.
That approach is evident in the way Thompson introduces Shakespeare to teenagers who may initially see the language as intimidating or remote.
“There’s no doubt that Shakespeare’s language is ornate and Baroque — but his language is also, believe it or not, ‘natural,’” Thompson said.
He said his solution is simple: get students to say the words aloud.
“So I make them ‘say’ Shakespeare, and then — like me — they often fall in love with how the words feel and what they mean,” he said.
Thompson said students soon discover that Shakespeare’s themes remain remarkably familiar — young love, ambition, reputation, honor, political corruption, jealousy and old age.
“I don’t have to work hard to make Shakespeare relevant; he always is,” he said.
But Thompson hopes his students leave his classroom with something much larger than an understanding of Shakespeare.
As a graduate student at Auburn University, Ley assigned Thompson a book by James Herndon titled “How to Survive in Your Native Land.” Thompson said the title became something of a secret motto for his own classroom.
“For me, Shakespeare is just a way for us to understand and experience more profoundly what it means to be alive and human,” Thompson said.
He also wants students to remember that learning can be joyful.
“I don’t expect my students necessarily to love the subject I teach, but I do expect them to love my class,” he said.
That belief carried into Thompson’s longtime involvement with Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation program. He organized and championed the program at Auburn High for years, helping prepare students who advanced through state competition and, in several cases, to the national level. One Auburn High student became a national champion.
Thompson said the experience changed him as a teacher.
“I would not be the teacher I am today without my experience coaching students in Poetry Out Loud,” he said. “POL taught me to truly value a student’s unique voice.”
He said literature and art belong to everyone, and each time a student reads, interprets or performs a work, both teacher and student can discover something new.
That willingness to keep learning has also shaped Thompson’s work with A+ College Ready, where he helps prepare other Advanced Placement teachers for their classrooms.
“A+ has made me a better teacher than I was when I started this career,” Thompson said.
He said one of the biggest lessons has been resisting the temptation to simply repeat the same lessons year after year.
A successful English classroom, Thompson said, should not be centered entirely on the teacher or the student.
“To me, the English classroom is neither teacher-centered nor student-centered; it is text-centered,” he said. “All of us are on a wondrous journey through a story or poem, trying to figure out what it means both to the author and to us and our lives.”
And, he added, there should always be joy.
“My joke is that when students ask me, ‘Why do we have to read this?’ I answer in one word — that is also my life philosophy: ‘Joy.’ An English classroom should be a place of joy.”
Thompson said his teaching has evolved over the years, particularly as he learned to give students more room to shape classroom discussions.
“My students have taught me to value their voices more in every part of the class,” he said.
Looking back, Thompson said it would be impossible to name only a few students who made his career meaningful.
He recalled something a mentor teacher, Margaret St. John, said when she retired: imagining all of the students and teachers she would never have met made her realize how much her life would have been “diminished.”
The word stayed with Thompson.
“When I consider all the wonderful young people and fellow teachers I’ve met and learned from over the years, I consider how much emptier my life would’ve been without them,” he said. “I’m glad that my life — like Mrs. St. John’s — was enlarged and not diminished.”
Ley sees that same enthusiasm each time the two meet for lunch.
“I always look forward to hearing his teaching stories, told with great enthusiasm and joy,” Ley said. “Those sessions always make me miss teaching.”
Former students often remember classroom discussions, comments Thompson wrote on their work, bits of advice or simply his sense of humor.
“I think most of them remember Mr. Thompson being goofy — because I am,” he said.
But what Thompson hopes they remember is simpler.
He hopes they remember that he loved being part of their journey into adulthood and loved literature enough to spend his life sharing it with them.
And, perhaps most importantly, he hopes they eventually pick up another book or poem.
“The Parr Award is a fitting award for a superb teacher and educational leader,” Ley said. “We have been fortunate to have him influence so many AHS students.”
