Literature Education Articles for Teachers - Page 2

Reviewing for assessments can honestly be worse than taking the actual test. Often middle and high schoolers aren’t familiar with good study strategies, and spend a few minutes reading over notes or skimming a study guide that you spent more time putting together than they spent studying. As teac...

Just last week, I lived one of a teacher’s recurring nightmares. I came into work to find that every single copier in the building was broken. As our building went through social turmoil equivalent to the fall of the Roman Empire, I wondered how my students were going to receive the benefits of t...

October is National Book Month! Sponsored by the National Book Foundation, students, families, and teachers are urged to get into the literary spirit by promoting books, storytelling, and everything reading-related! During October, encourage participation in a variety of activities revolving arou...

The Outsiders is one of those books that will change the lives of its readers. In a world of sparkly vampires and too many shades of grey, it's good to read a book that confronts the struggles of adolescence in a meaningful way that is just as relevant now as it was in the sixties. The Outsiders,...

My education background and career choice have a tenuous and somewhat ironic relationship. I was homeschooled K-12 before I went to a four-year liberal arts college, and I am now a teacher at a Title 1 public high school, even though I never attended a high school. There is no need for me to def...

Field trips are always a point of contention among teachers and administrators. On one hand, field trips can be an inspirational experience for children. On the other hand, they are expensive, require significant planning, and often spend more time in a bus than at the site of the field trip. The...

Anything written by Herman Melville can feel intimidating to the average reader. Best known for the ponderous novel Moby-Dick, Melville has a reputation for complex themes using elaborate symbols, metaphors, and allusions to the Old Testament. While Moby-Dick is his best-known work, he also wrote...

In a classroom where critical thinking is cherished and answers are never really wrong, one can argue that there really is no right way to interpret Shakespeare’s works. In terms of developing a 21st Century learner, we should teach our children that almost everything is open to interpretation,...

Just typing in the words Loch Ness as part of a Google search brought back the feelings I felt when I first heard about this famous legend as a young child. As I scrolled through the search results, I glanced at the photos, recognizing the most famous one featuring an animal that resembles a bron...

Ray Bradbury was an unstoppable force of literature, and his influence will endure far beyond his recent death on June 5th, 2012. After 91 years of life, his bibliography includes 27 novels and 600 short stories, as well as numerous plays, screenplays, and teleplays. This prolific collection was ...

There is no denying that comic books and graphic novels have entered the mainstream conversation. Earlier this month, The Avengers came out in theaters to the tune of $641.8 million worldwide, just in the opening week. The Dark Knight Rises, the final film in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, i...

Today, educators are looking for ways to increase critical thinking in the area of reading comprehension. It is not enough to simply expect students to recall information they have read. There is a movement in teaching to get learners to think more critically about the literature they read. This ...

As part of my journey to create a first-ever literary magazine at my school, I assembled a staff and helped them devise a title, determine a layout and construct a submission process. But all this would be meaningless if there aren’t any poems for submission. My next challenge was to transform my...

Almost every high school English department has a student-made literary magazine. It is a great way to give students an opportunity to express themselves beyond standard essay writing, and creating a literary magazine can be an exciting and rewarding adventure as well. This task is easier said th...

An exploration of the book "A Lesson Before Dying" by Ernest J. Gaines is becoming quite common in many high school literature courses. If you are not familiar with it, it is a novel that explores racial and social inequality. In my class, I center my unit on the book on one question—what is a ma...