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Novels for When We Need Them the Most
Charles Dickens On our way to my aunt’s memorial service in Acton, Massachusetts this past weekend, Julia and I listened to several chapters from David Copperfield, a book I haven’t read since the...
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How Jane Eyre Is Not Twilight
Fritz Eichenberg, “Jane Eyre” Among the gifts I received from my students last semester was a new understanding of how Jane Eyre provides a healthy relationship model for young women. I particularly...
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Reading Novels for Moral Instruction
Finney and York in “Tom Jones” Today on “Recovered Blog Posts” I reprint a lost essay that originally appeared on November 4, 2009. As it turns out, it could have been written yesterday, which is when...
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500 Days of Marianne & Willoughby
Deschanel, Gordon-Levitt in “500 Days of Summer” In a recent post I discussed how, in my Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy class, I encourage my students to compare the works we read with...
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Reading My Way to Adulthood
Ralph Hedley Thursday Teaching Philip Pullman’s Subtle Knife, the second volume of his Dark Materials trilogy, has me thinking of how I used reading to negotiate the end of my childhood innocence....
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Wiglaf on Helping Those Who Resist Help
Students reenact the death of Beowulf and the response of his warriors Thursday A major blessing of this blog has been getting to know superb English teachers around the country and around the world....
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The Classics as Teen Survival Guides
Artist unknown Wednesday Last week I wrote about the early chapters in Phuc Tran’s memoir Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In (2020). Landing in Carlyle,...
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Hamlet and a Teen Suicide Outbreak
Dakota Collins as Hamlet in Sewanee production Tuesday Yesterday, after seeing a Sewanee student production of Hamlet, I compared Claudius’s successful coup to Donald Trump’s attempted one. Today I’m...
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Lucille Clifton on Turning Red
Publicity illustration for Turning Red Tuesday My granddaughters, who turn 10, 8 and 6 this year, are excited by the new Pixar film Turning Red, although the youngest girl (along three-year-old Ocean,...
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