Seeking Input and Sharing Resources

We hope you've enjoyed some well-earned time to relax and recharge this summer that's sparked new ideas for the upcoming school year. We are enjoying working on some new projects, one of which we'd like your input on. More on that in a moment, but first, some resources to help your planning for the new year:

• Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby features classroom-ready text sets that support critical, timely conversations around race, immigration, and inequality in connection with Fitzgerald's novel. These readings, accompanied by vocabulary activities and reading and writing/discussion prompts, support student inquiry into questions like "Why Should We Care About Economic Inequality?" and "What Is Tom Worried About--Is Civilization 'Going to Pieces'?" Check out our blog for ideas on how to put present-day issues in dialogue with Gatsby.

• Our volume on To Kill a Mockingbird presents text sets that examine the relationship between Calpurnia and Scout, question whether Atticus is a hero, and help your students to think critically about (and to even "read against") canonical works like Mockingbird.

• If you are teaching A Raisin in the Sun, our second volume will help you underscore the enduring relevance of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play with ready-to-use text sets on housing discrimination past and present, the violence surrounding housing desegregation, and more.

• Looking for ways to collaborate with your content-area colleagues around literacy? Check out Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text. This volume offers practical strategies for initiating cross-disciplinary collaboration and developing students’ disciplinary literacy skills, as well as a sample unit based on a science article and an excerpt from Lord of the Flies.

While we love finding engaging connections with the canonical works we teach, we are also huge fans of a lot of the young adult fiction that teachers are increasingly incorporating into their curricula. So, we've been working on a new text set centered around one of the most beloved YA novels -- more on that soon! In the meantime, we've been thinking about how/when/why we do assign YA novels in our ELA classes -- especially those that touch upon some of the challenging and sensitive issues that students often face. And we'd love to get your input, so please check out our previous post  and/or complete this short survey.

Finally, if you’d like hands-on training in our approach to using informational text, contact us about scheduling a professional development session in your school or district. We offer half-day and full-day workshops for both English and/or content-area teachers. If you are in NJ, we hope to see you at NJCTE in September and please join us at NJEA in November. Otherwise, we hope to see you at NCTE in Baltimore!

We hope our resources help you create rewarding learning experiences for you and your students. If you use any of our materials, please send us your feedback. We would also greatly appreciate it if you would post a review on Goodreads or Amazon. Thank you again for your interest -- and everything you do for your students!

How Stevenson's Just Mercy illuminates injustice and Mockingbird

There’s a blurb on the cover of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption that compares Stevenson to Atticus Finch: “Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American South. Though larger than life, Atticus exists only in fiction. Bryan Stevenson, however, is very much alive and doing God’s work fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those without hope.”

As readers invested in thinking critically about the character of Atticus in TKAM and wary of the idea of Atticus as someone who “made such a difference in the American South,” this blurb strikes us as misleading, to say the least. Atticus, remember, did not strive to defend Tom Robinson, nor did he do so successfully. The idea that we celebrate this lawyer as some kind of hero of civil rights is a bit odd, no? (Stevenson himself notes this irony.)

But Stevenson’s book, his tale of his own work as a lawyer defending Walter McMillian, a native of Harper Lee’s Monroe County, forces the comparison in a way that is intriguing for readers of TKAM. 

First off, Walter, like Tom Robinson, grew up in one of the black neighborhoods outside Monroeville. While this community may have celebrated Lee’s novel, transforming an old, local courthouse into a “Mockingbird” museum and producing a local stage version of the novel, Walter’s story suggests that Lee’s ideas may not have been fully embraced. 

As Stevenson tells the story, when Ronda Morrison, the 18-year-old daughter of a white, wealthy family was found dead in 1986, Walter McMillian was arrested.

Walter had a few things going against him. He was poor and black. And he had engaged in an interracial, adulterous affair with a white woman.

Ultimately, all those factors play a role in this horrifying tale of injustice. There’s police misconduct, corruption, and incompetence. Unbelievable elements include the fact that Walter is placed on death row while he is a pretrial detainee. As Stevenson notes, this is “almost never done.”

The piece of Walter’s story that most resonates with TKAM is his conviction for this murder (no spoiler: this happens quite early in the otherwise quite suspenseful book). The connection with TKAM is the craziness of that conviction. Just as Atticus and everyone in Maycomb knows that Tom Robinson couldn’t possibly have choked Mayella with his damaged left arm, everyone in Monroeville knows (or should know) that Walter couldn’t have killed Ronda. On the day of the murder, he was at a fish fry at his house, with members of his family and at least a dozen church parishioners.

The ways in which law enforcement manufactures evidence, primarily through manipulating people to testify against Walter, is a fascinating piece of the story. And readers will be engrossed in Stevenson’s discussion of his own journey as a young lawyer and his broader fight to serve death-row inmates and address what he identifies as the injustice of poverty. 

But Stevenson draws one scene in his book that drives home the horror of Walter’s and Tom’s conviction – and in a way that Harper Lee does not capture. Stevenson, as part of his defense of Walter, goes to meet two dozen of his family members. We quote the passage at length, with some excerpting:

“It would have been so much easier if he had been out in the woods hunting by himself when that girl was killed.” Armelia Hand, Walter McMillian’s older sister, paused while the crowd in the small trailer called out in affirmation. . . . 

“At least then we could understand how it might be possible for him to have done this.” . . .

“But because we were standing next to him that whole morning . . . We knowwhere he was. . . . We know what he was doing!” People hummed in agreement as her voice grew louder and more distraught. It was the kind of wordless testimony of struggle and anguish I heard all the time growing up in a small rural black church. . . .

“We were with him all day! What are we supposed to do, Mr. Stevenson? Tell us, what are we supposed to do with that?”

Her face twisted in pain. “I feel like I’ve been convicted, too.”

The small crowd responded to each statement with shots of “Yes!” and “That’s right!”

“I feel like they done put me on death row, too. What do we tell these children about how to stay out of harm’s way when you can be at your own house, minding your own business, surrounded by your entire family, and they still put some murder on you that you ain’t do and send you to death row?” (92-93)

This passage about injustice in relation to a 1986 murder is so full of possibilities for readers of TKAM trying to think critically about Harper Lee’s meditation on injustice in relation to a rape in the 30s. Why doesn’t Lee include a scene between Atticus and the members of Robinson’s family and the broader black community in Maycomb after the conviction? What would that scene look like? What would Tom’s wife have said? How would Tom’s children have responded? How would their lives have been disfigured by the brutal injustice that not only took their father’s life but instilled in them the idea that they were also convicted?

What Stevenson does here, in a way that Lee does not, is to highlight how one miscarriage of justice is an act of terrorism enacted on an entire community. That’s the work that lynching was designed to do. A lynching wasn’t simply intended to punish one individual but to terrify a community. That’s why lynchings were such public, publicized spectacles: so the message of terror would spread far and wide. Tom escapes lynching in TKAM, thanks to Scout’s disarming interaction with her schoolmate’s father, Mr. Cunningham, but Tom’s death by seventeen bullets while in government custody surely has a similar chilling effect on the African-American community in Maycomb. 

Reading Just Mercy alongside TKAM underscores, one more time, the ways in which Scout’s blinkered perspective can’t or doesn’t expose the ugliest elements of Lee’s story. But with our students, by juxtaposing TKAM with an excerpt from Just Mercy, we can help our students do that work and see what Scout does not.

Thoughts on Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

We just finished reading the fascinating Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, by Casey Cep. 

Cep sets herself three tasks. In the first section of the book, she investigates and tells the story of Reverend Maxwell. The Reverend, an African-American preacher, army veteran, and pulpwooder, was accused and exonerated in the killing his first wife. In turn, he cashed in on several life insurance policies he had placed on her. In the years that followed, more people around the Reverend died, including the husband of his second wife, that second wife, the Reverend’s brother and nephew, and the daughter of his third wife. Each death was followed by numerous, often contested, payments on life insurance policies taken out by the Reverend on the now dead. The Reverend is a larger-than-life figure, feared in his community not just for his association with these many deaths, but for his rumored voodoo powers. The climax of this section of the book is the death of Maxwell, shot at close range at the funeral of his stepdaughter by her sister’s husband.

The second section of the book tells the story of Tom Radney, an equally complex character in his own right. Radney was a progressive state senator in 60s Alabama. His early career was marked by one pivotal moment: his decision to identify himself as an icon of the New South and to support Edward Kennedy (and not George Wallace) for the presidential nomination. Vandalism and death threats followed, and Radney withdrew from politics. In 1969, he reentered, running for lieutenant governor, but he was defeated. Cep notes that Radney may have been not ahead of his time but “ahead of his place” (100). He wanted to bring change to Alabama, but he didn’t end up doing so in the legislative arena. Instead, he made his career as a trial lawyer. His office, called the Zoo, served rich and poor, white and black, and he thrived. In fact, Radney successfully defended the Reverend in the only murder charge he faced, for the death of his first wife, and worked to secure payment for the Reverend in his many disputed insurance claims. The climax of this section is Radney’s successful use of the insanity defense to secure exoneration for Robert Burns, the Reverend’s assassin.

The last section, and the one many English teachers and readers of Mockingbird will be most interested in, is the story of Harper Lee and her apparently unsuccessful attempt to write the story of the Reverend and Radney. Cep writes of Lee’s refusals of celebrity and conventionality, of her deep intellectualism and curiosity, and of difficult relationship with writing. In particular, Cep focuses on the ways in which Lee’s scrupulous dedication to accuracy, in contrast to Truman Capote’s practice with In Cold Blood, presents unique challenges: an absence of facts, self-serving memories by those involved, and confounding protagonists. Ultimately, for reasons that we may never fully understand, Lee seems to have found herself unable to write this story.

One moment in the final section is particularly striking in light of the persistent and thoughtful conversations about the politics of Mockingbird. Cep writes of Lee’s editor, Tay Hohoff, and her insistence that it would be “best to convert readers to the cause of racial justice with a child’s loss of innocence [rather] than to condemn them through the disillusioned voice of an adult daughter” (179). Hence the shift to the narrative voice of Scout, in Mockingbird, and away from the adult perspective of Watchman. In Watchman, Atticus is condemned by his daughter as a member of the White Citizens’ Council. In Mockingbird, Scout’s ability to criticize her father’s accommodationism and political complacency is limited by her age and her inability to see outside the world of Maycomb and the courthouse.

In an otherwise carefully nuanced and researched book, Cep states blandly that Atticus in Mockingbird remains “heroic forever” (178). It’s disappointing to see Cep render this simplistic reading of Atticus. Certainly she’s in good company. Mockingbird was received and canonized, just as Hohoff had hoped it would be, as “a redemptive story of tolerance” (178). The film version, probably more well-known in our culture, particularly for those who never actually read the book, bolsters this view of Atticus as heroic and the book overall as redemptive. (Teachers can find resources for undertaking a more complex consideration of Atticus in our volume on Mockingbird.)

Of course Tom Robinson, shot in the back seventeen times, does not receive redemption, and Atticus himself issues an ominous warning, not of redemption but of retribution: “Don’t fool yourselves—it’s all adding up [racial injustice] and one of these days we’re going to pay the bill for it.” The violence enacted on Scout and Jem at the end of the novel hints at exactly the kind of bill-paying to come in a society that complacently looks away from the brutality in its midst.

Perhaps Lee’s vision of the South was more complicated than the “palliative plot” (178) she, under the guidance of Hohoff, found herself telling as she transformed the story of southern racism in Watchman into Mockingbird. Was Lee’s attempt to take on the story of the Reverend her way of rejecting Hohoff’s politics and her own compromises? Certainly, taking on the tale of a black Alabama preacher who worked the insurance system to make himself a fortune and may or may not have murdered his family along the way, could not have been a more challenging choice for the author of the much-beloved Mockingbird.

Would the world have welcomed this sort of book from Lee? The vitriol surrounding the publication of Watchman probably suggests the answer.

In any case, Casey Cip has taken up Lee’s mantle, and we have Furious Hours. For those of us who find Lee, Mockingbird, and Watchman to be intriguing, complex pieces of the story of American literary and cultural history, the plot thickens.

Is it time to replace Mockingbird?

In response to a Tweet by teacher Jacqueline Stallworth (@thebigseablog) about why she stopped teaching TKAM, Laurie Halse Anderson recently asked her Twitter followers, “Are you still teaching To Kill a Mockingbird? Why?” The result has been a vibrant, energetic discussion. We encourage students and teachers of TKAM to read and think about these critical issues (as teachers in Duluth, Minn., have been doing so recently), and we want to celebrate the fact that many of us are claiming space in our schools and/or via social media to think carefully about the complex issue of what we think students should read and why. For us, this is an exciting, important discussion with no simple answers.

That said, we have a few points to add on this topic.

The most important thing, we think, when considering what texts should and shouldn’t be taught in the classroom is the ultimate goal: We want students to read. If they don’t read, nothing else really matters. And no one should underestimate the challenge of getting students today to read. We love/hate Penny Kittle’s video, “Why Students Don’t Read What Is Assigned in Class.” As teachers, we work hard to engage our students with the texts we are teaching, but there is no shame in admitting that this is one of the biggest challenges English educators face. Each of us as teachers brings different skill sets to this challenge. Each of us finds different texts exciting and relevant. Just as importantly, each student, each class of students, and each moment in the classroom can render one text the perfect text to teach and another text a heavy lift.

Next in importance to the issue of getting students to actually do the reading, we think, is the challenge of getting students to be thoughtful, critical readers, who can understand and articulate why reading matters and what’s important about a text. We’ve written and talked about Audrey’s first year-college students’ memory of their high school experience with Gatsby, for example. Her students had vague recollections of symbols, the green light, and rich people. Some remembered the idea of the American Dream. Few could articulate an idea of why Fitzgerald’s text matters or why it’s worth reading. 

If students can’t articulate what matters about a text, does it really make a difference whether they pass their eyes over the pages? Or remember that the green light was a symbol of something? Or that the text somehow connected with some vague idea about the American Dream?

Of course, it’s hard for a teenager or early college student to articulate why a text matters. But surely that’s one of our critical tasks in the classroom. 

Having paid respect to the challenges of getting students to read and to read critically, we can turn to the questions: Is it time for TKAM to be replaced? Has the time come to update this text?

Perhaps. Aaron Sorkin has tried an update of sorts in his new Broadway production, which, among other things, underscores the links between the current American and international climate of white supremacy and the historically-specific racism of Bob Ewell, Maycomb, and the 30s KKK. Like Spike Lee in BlacKKKlansman, Sorkin uses TKAM to connect the past and the present and to remind us of our ugly history and its many-tentacled connections to today.

Sorkin struggles, however, to do more to give voice to the African-American perspective in TKAM. He tries some tweaks, but ultimately, the focus and perspective in his play, as in Lee’s novel, belong to Scout and Atticus, not Calpurnia and Tom Robinson.

Whatever else it may be and whatever it may do in terms of interrogating issues of race and justice, TKAM is not a novel written from an African-American perspective. It does not offer students the opportunity to read a narrative that represents the viewpoint of an African-American writer or character. And surely we can agree that our students deserve to see many different perspectives, written by a range of different writers, in the texts they read. That’s one argument for replacing TKAM. There are many, many wonderful rich and complex texts by authors of color out there, and students deserve to see a variety of texts and authors in the curriculum and the classroom. 

That said, we can’t wait for a revision of TKAM from the perspective of Zeebo, Calpurnia’s son, or Lula, the African-American woman who objects to Scout and Jem’s presence in the church, or perhaps one of Tom’s children. Young writers out there, get going!

Such a re-writing would be particularly important because TKAM is such an important text in American cultural history. That may not be reason enough for it still to be taught, but TKAM’s cultural capital makes it a particularly useful text for students to be able to think critically about. For some of us, the ability to navigate and think critically about this text is one reason to still teach it. In fact, it is a valuable opportunity to teach students how to “read against” a canonical text.

How do we get students to do that work of thinking critically about TKAM? How do we ensure we are teaching this complex and problematic text well? For us, paired texts are the key.

In Using Informational Text to Teach TKAM, we offer selections to make it easier for students to do this kind of work. A brief reading on entails, for example, unpacks the class politics of Maycomb, allowing students to understand the complex caste system within Maycomb, and why the Ewell’s poverty is different from the Cunningham’s. Excerpts from memoirs by the Scottsboro boys allow readers to think critically about Scout’s youthful and clueless perception and representation of the near-lynching of Tom. Consideration of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s decision in Loving v. Virginia contextualizes Dolphus Raymond’s drunken subterfuge and reminds us that both in the 30s when the novel was set and in 1960, when the novel was published, interracial marriage was criminal in some areas of the U.S. We also include pieces by Stephen Jones and David Margolick that raise questions about Atticus’s heroism and the continued challenges for lawyers of representing politically unpopular clients.

Important, critical work can be done in the classroom with TKAM.

The publication of Go Set a Watchman created even more possibilities for engaging pairings. We have a piece, to be published in Mockingbird Grows Up: Re-Reading Harper Lee Since Watchman, edited by Jonathan S. Cullick and Cheli Reutter (U of Tennessee P, 2020), centered around Calpurnia and the representation of black women, particularly nannies. Our lesson opens with a photograph, titled “Quaker Oats’s Aunt Jemima,” which depicts the seemingly loving relationship between an older black nanny and her young white charge and aligns with young Scout’s untroubled view of a nurturing Calpurnia. We then add to the discussion an excerpt from “Interview: A Perspective on the 1930s,” which offers a discussion among three now-elderly white women who, like Scout, grew up with black nannies in the 1930s South, which allows students to see the women’s blindspots about the loving, “wonderful” black people with whom they interacted. Next, we add an interview with Dorothy Bolden, an African-American woman who worked as a domestic in the 1930s South and subsequently founded the National Domestic Workers Union, in an audio excerpt, archived at the Voices of Labor Oral History Project on the Georgia State University Library website. In her own powerful and challenging language, Bolden describes the narrow “chalk line” African-Americans had to walk to earn low wages in the limited employment options available to them. Bolden’s focus is not on the attachment between white children and their black caregivers but instead on the “system” of domestic labor in which those caregivers were respected -- but only within the house -- paid poorly, and forced to walk a fine line of acquiescence and silence. 

When we then turn to the relationship between Scout and Calpurnia, students have built an informative context in which to consider the relationship between Scout and Calpurnia. They are now ready to examine the key moments foregrounding that complex relationship, including Calpurnia’s “double life” and “command of two languages” at church in Mockingbird and the hostile, remote Calpurnia in Watchman who stiffly assumes “company manners” and rejects the now-adult Jean Louise.

Should TKAM still be taught? There’s no easy answer here. But what’s critically important is that we keep asking the question – about TKAM and about all the texts we teach. Which texts should we teach and why? The answers surely should change, from time to time, place to place, classroom to classroom, and teacher to teacher.

Ultimately, what matters most is that we have and continue to have these sorts of discussions about the books, like TKAM, that we teach.

Using informational text to revamp, disrupt, and recharge your curriculum

Though we always welcome time to relax and recharge over the summer, our energy for the new school year starts revving up come August. If you're thinking about revamping your curriculum and maybe even disrupting some of the texts (#DisruptTexts) you've traditionally taught or inherited, our Using Informational Text series can help. (Disclaimer: We do not intend to claim credit for the great conversation started by @TriciaEbarvia this summer; we are simply offering resources to help teachers engage in this important work.)

Our newest volume on The Great Gatsby offers classroom-ready units featuring nonfiction excerpts that support critical conversations with students around race, immigration, and inequality in connection with Fitzgerald's 1920s novel, which seems more relevant than ever in our present political and cultural climate. These readings, accompanied by vocabulary activities and guided reading and discussion prompts, support student inquiry into essential questions like "Why Should We Care About Economic Inequality?" and "What Is Tom Buchanan Worried About--Is Civilization 'Going to Pieces'?" If you'd like a preview of how to put present-day issues in dialogue with Gatsby, check out our recent blog posts on both the difficulties and enduring relevance of Fitzgerald’s classic novel.

Similarly, our volume on To Kill a Mockingbird presents units that examine the relationship between Calpurnia and Scout, question whether Atticus is a hero, and help your students think critically about the characters and the complex world Harper Lee depicts (and even teach them to "read against" canonical works like Mockingbird).

If you are teaching A Raisin in the Sun, the second volume in our series will help you underscore the enduring relevance of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play. In it, you will find ready-to-use units on housing discrimination past and present, the violence surrounding housing desegregation, the politics of African-American women’s hair, and more.

If you are looking for ways to collaborate with your content-area colleagues around literacy, check out Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text. This volume offers practical strategies for initiating cross-disciplinary collaboration and developing students’ disciplinary literacy skills, as well as a sample unit based on a science article and an excerpt from Lord of the Flies.

If you are thinking about how to revamp your curriculum in general, our website and blog feature resources and strategies for finding great informational texts that relate to any literary work you may be teaching and using them successfully in your classroom. We also offer ideas for teaching key vocabulary in meaningful and engaging ways and using multimedia together with written informational texts. Check out our sample units based on Mockingbird for models.

If you’d like hands-on training in our approach to using informational text, contact us about scheduling a professional development session in your school or district. We offer half-day and full-day workshops for both English and/or content-area teachers. If you are in the NJ/PA area, we look forward to seeing you at NJCTE in September, PCTELA in October, or NJEA in November. Otherwise, we hope to see you at NCTE and CEL in Houston!

We hope our resources will help you create rewarding learning experiences for you and your students. If you use any of our materials, please send us your feedback. We would also greatly appreciate it if you would post a review on Goodreads or Amazon. Thank you again for your interest and support!

New documentaries connect with Raisin and Mockingbird (Part 2)

The other documentary we recently discovered is the four-part series The Loving Generation, which features interviews with individuals who were born to interracial couples in the 20 years following the 1969 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, which ruled anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.

Our unit in Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill a Mockingbird features an excerpt from the Loving decision to help students make sense out of the character of Dolphus Raymond in chapter 16. Just as Scout doesn’t understand why Raymond lives the way he does, students today are likely unaware of the Loving decision, the anti-miscegenation laws it overturned, and the effects of both that extend to the present day. Any episode in the series would provide an engaging hook into this unit (perhaps along with a clip from the recent dramatization of the Lovings’ story).

The first episode, “Census,” introduces Loving v. Virginia and focuses on the reflections of members of The Loving Generation on their mixed-race parentage and how that influenced how they identify themselves personally and publicly.

In the second episode, “We Are Family,” the interview subjects speak about how race was dealt with within their immediate family and on their relationships with both sides of their extended families, especially in the era of Trump.

“Coming of Age,” the third episode, captures the interviewees’ thoughts about how being biracial affected them socially during their school years. This episode is particularly promising as a springboard for discussion with students about growing up amid the sociocultural politics of mixed racial heritage in the U.S. today.

The fourth episode, “The Obama Era,” confronts the idea that, with the election of Barack Obama, America entered a post-racial era. It also focuses on what the election of a biracial president meant personally to members of The Loving Generation, especially now that so many of them are parents themselves raising multiracial children of their own.

The 10-12-minute length of each of these episodes makes them easy to incorporate into a class period, and they are enormously timely and relevant subjects of discussion in ELA or social studies classes in their own right. However, we think these episodes have particular value to teachers who are striving to make connections between To Kill a Mockingbird and the present day.

We are always on the lookout for new connections to the books we love to teach not only because it builds timely relevance for our students, but it also reinvigorates our teaching. Furthermore, it models for our students the critical disposition of paying attention to the world and looking for new ideas and connections to help us understand and navigate our everyday lives. And it’s so much fun!

The importance of teaching students to read against canonical texts like Mockingbird

Periodically, on NCTE’s Connected Community, in our hallways, at conferences, and sometimes in our classrooms, we have one persistent and difficult conversation. How do we balance teaching canonical literature on the one hand and offering our students, on the other hand, what Latrise Johnson describes as “texts that include diverse characters but also . . . are reflective of students’ rich and complex histories”? This debate seems to surface, in particular, around To Kill a Mockingbird. Most recently, Will Menarndt argues in “Forget Atticus” that we should stop teaching TKAM.

Mockingbird has a long history of being lauded; Oprah has called it “our national book” and recent research suggests that many (white) teachers use TKAM to address multicultural issues, particularly race and racism (Macaluso 280). Depending on how that work is done with TKAM, particularly if we are spending the majority of our time highlighting the “obvious and overt racism” (Macaluso 282) in Harper Lee’s novel, we may be in danger of telling what Chimamanda Adichie warns against: the single story. Obvious and overt racism have been and remain only part of the complex story of racism. Students need to deepen their understanding of the institutional and structural racism that pervades Maycomb – in its housing, schools, and employment opportunities. The issues that Tom Robinson encounters with Maycomb’s justice system, like the lynch mob, are just the tip of the iceberg.

TKAM can be taught fruitfully in relation to that broader story of racism, and many teachers, before and after the publication of Go Set a Watchman, were doing that important work: complicating and troubling the dominant narrative of Atticus as the white savior and Tom as the voiceless, crippled, black victim. Michael Macaluso offers a thoughtful example of that work in his discussion of the lynch mob scene at the jailhouse. Reading against TKAM, for Macaluso, offers students the opportunity to see Atticus’s racism, even in this moment of defense of Tom Robinson, as “evidence of how racism works through privilege . . . and how it is laced into institutional and cultural practices and behaviors” (285).

This practice of reading against the text, particularly when the text is a canonical staple and as such has been central to reifying our dominant ideologies, is what Carlin Borsheim-Black, Macaluso, and Robert Petrone call critical literacy pedagogy (CLP): an approach that “teaches students to read and write against texts and understand that language and texts are not neutral and always ideological” (123).

Using CLP to read TKAM, in other words, reveals a text that on the one hand offers an anti-racist message but on the other hand is bound up with and in concert with a fundamentally racist ideology. This may be what Borsheim-Black, Macaluso, and Petrone call a dissonant realization for students, but it’s an important pedagogical opportunity.

We need to continue to do the important work of welcoming different voices into our classroom and to be sure that our literary curricula change to reflect our current student body. And surely it’s time for us to leave behind the idea that TKAM is an ideal vehicle for a complete and comprehensive discussion of the vast and complex issues of multiculturalism, race, and racism today.

Still, we need to recognize the cultural capital of Harper Lee’s novel: it continues to be idolized and adored (Macaluso 286) in our broader culture. Teaching TKAM, using the CLP model to read both with and against this text, allows students to discover for themselves the ideological complexity of this American novel.

We offer our model of text clusters and companion texts (our series with Rowman and Littlefield) as a productive component of CLP. Reading excerpts from Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad, two of the Scottsboro boys, about their experience with a lynch mob, students can see for themselves what’s left out of the near-lynching scene in TKAM. Loving v. Virginia makes visible the legal and institutional racism that forces Dolphus Raymond’s to feign drunkenness in order to protect his mixed-race family. An interview with white women who grew up with black domestics in the 30s, particularly when paired with excerpts from an interview with Dorothy Bolden, an African-American woman who worked as a domestic in the 1930s South and founded the National Domestic Workers Union, can unpack and unsettle the representation of Calpurnia.

After all, what really matters is not whether our students can read TKAM as racist or anti-racist but whether we are preparing our students to be powerful and resistant readers of the many texts of our world, including those canonical texts that occupy positions of outsized ideological power.

Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TedGlobal. July 2009, Lecture, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.

Borsheim-Black, Carlin, Macaluso, Michael, and Robert Petrone. “Critical Literature Pedagogy: Teaching Canonical Literature for Critical Literacy.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58.2, Oct. 2014, pp. 123-133.

Johnson, Latrise. “Students Don’t Need Diverse Literature Just Because It’s Diverse.” NCTE, 12 April 2016, http://www2.ncte.org/blog/2016/04/students-dont-need-diverse-literature-just-diverse/.

Macaluso, Michael. “Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird Today: Coming to Terms With Race, Racism, and America’s Novel.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 61.3, Nov./Dec. 2017, pp. 279-287.

The Atlantic highlights value of historical fiction in building context, critical thinking

We just finished reading the great new piece, “Using Historical Fiction to Connect Past and Present,” in The Atlantic. Anna Diamond discusses how teachers are turning to historical fiction to build historical context around some of the issues of race, gender, and discrimination raised by the recent election and the current presidential administration. Diamond talks about the ways in which historical fiction also allows teachers to “[h]umaniz[e] history” so that students can “connect the historical dots” and build empathy.

One key point in the article worth emphasizing is the fact that historical fiction is still fiction. Fiction may be more appealing than a history textbook and perhaps more entertaining and engaging, but using historical fiction to help students think about the past poses challenges as well.

So, how can we use historical fiction to promote critical thinking and “counter the often static and monolithic view of the past”? Diamond cites the work of Sara Schwebel, author of Child-Sized Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms, as one answer. Schwebel stresses an interdisciplinary approach, in which students think about different accounts and points of view in order to interrogate historical fiction as an “historical argument” rather than simple facts or historical truth.

We think the interdisciplinary and multi-text approach is key to helping students think critically and see those different points of view in any kind of text. And we want to underscore how students today, more than ever, need to develop this intellectual skill of thinking critically about the information they are receiving or consuming. Whether we are teaching historical fiction, history, literature, or even science, students need to move beyond relatively simple questions of validity and reliability of sources; they need to assess the accuracy of information in terms of shades of grey, not just black and white.

Like Diamond and Schwebel, we think the key to getting students to interrogate challenging issues is to present them with what we call text clusters -- combinations of texts, including multimedia texts -- that represent different perspectives in relation to a complex issue. For example, we built a unit around the issue of African-American domestic labor in connection with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. We use visuals of Aunt Jemima, excerpts from an interview with white women raised by black nannies, and a powerful audio clip of an interview with Dorothy Bolden, an African-American domestic labor organizer, in order to get students to think critically about how Scout’s perspective about Calpurnia is shaped and limited by her place in the world of Macomb.

Does Scout’s blinkered view of Calpurnia make her narrative in Mockingbird less accurate? Yes, and in literary studies we have a term for that lack of accuracy on the part of the narrator: Scout is an unreliable narrator. The fact that Mockingbird is constructed around the storytelling of an unreliable narrator, however, doesn’t make it less valuable as a text: it makes it more valuable. It underscores how important it is for readers to think critically about the story, about what Scout is and is not telling us, about the gaps and distortions in her views, particularly in relation to Calpurnia. Adding other perspectives through relevant literary and nonfiction texts, including those that offer different avenues into Calpurnia’s world, opens up the conversation for students.

To be clear: this practice of careful, suspicious reading, supported by multiple texts, makes us careful readers not just of historical fiction but of all text. It is, as Diamond notes, very much in keeping with the Common Core. And very valuable in a world in which thinking critically about disinformation and fake news need to be part of every teacher’s task.

Invoking Mockingbird, Obama reminds us of importance, difficulty of empathy

In his Farewell Address on January 10, 2017, President Obama once again charmed and pleased many English teachers across the United States with his reference to Atticus Finch and To Kill a Mockingbird.

In case you missed the moment, Obama said, “if our democracy is to work in this increasingly diverse nation, then each one of us need[s] to try to heed the advice of a great character in American fiction – Atticus Finch – who said, `You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’”

This passage, a favorite for many teachers, comes at the beginning of Chapter 4, when Atticus describes the practice of climbing into another’s skin, or what we might today call radical empathy, to Scout as a “simple trick” (39). The current political moment suggests there is nothing simple about it.

Indeed, Obama acknowledges in his Address the difficulty and rarity of this act of empathy. He presses Americans to “pay attention, and listen … acknowledging that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t vanish in the ‘60s.” Obama insists that we also need to work to tie the “struggles for justice to the challenges that a lot of people in this country face … [including] the middle-aged white guy who, from the outside, may seem like he’s got advantages, but has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological change.”

The allusion to Mockingbird seems a perfect exemplar for Obama’s point and for our current political moment. Tom Robinson and Calpurnia live in a desperately unequal world. In Maycomb, their lives are simply worth less; they are disempowered and dispossessed.

But so too is Mr. Ewell. Scout as narrator in Mockingbird explains that the “families like the Ewells” (227) inhabit every town like Maycomb. They are people left behind by both good times and bad: “No economic fluctuations changed their station – people like the Ewells lived as guests of the county in prosperity as well as in the depths of a depression” (227).

Just as Atticus never really steps into Tom Robinson’s skin and imagines the world from his point of view, the plight of the Ewells, who actually live in “what was once a Negro cabin” (227), is never tied together by anyone in Maycomb as part of a broader struggle for justice in the novel. One might say that the two disempowered characters live in their separate bubbles, until their worlds collide. Mr. Ewell is the antagonist, of course, but both characters suffer, disproportionately of course, from their place in the world of Maycomb in which they are not seen by the broader society or by each other.

Obama’s Address asks us to do what is definitively NOT a simple trick: to see each other and all those who are interconnected with us; to listen to each other and have real dialogue, rather than stay in our bubbles or snipe at each other over social media.

For those of us teaching Mockingbird, this is one more moment in which we can use informational text – in this case Obama’s Address – to show students the relevance of the literary texts we teach and to cultivate in our students the skills, disposition, and courage to become engaged, informed citizens. 

Using 'Loving' to teach 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

There’s lots of talk about the recent film Loving, directed by Jeff Nichols, and starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as the interracial couple who triumphed in the Supreme Court over Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws. It’s a sweet film, and one that takes an intimate approach to the subject in a way that is sure to be embraced by teachers. Loving contrasts the quotidian events of rural life and love with the broader politics of racism in the United States in a way that mostly charms, even if it is somewhat frustrating in its deliberate focus away from the Civil Rights Movement.

In an interview with NPR, Nichols discusses how he first became aware of the story of Richard and Mildred Loving and their battle with anti-miscegenation laws in Virginia when he was introduced to the HBO documentary on the Lovings in 2012. Nichols says, “[F]or that to be the first time that I heard about Richard and Mildred Loving was kind of unacceptable to me. I think this is something that people more than just law students that have taken constitutional law classes, you know, should have a familiarity with, especially now.”

We couldn’t agree more. So many of our nation’s signature Supreme Court cases are unknown to the people of our nation. And many of the decisions, like Loving v. Virginia, are actually relatively accessible and deeply engaging. They certainly are readable by, as Nichols writes, “more than just law students.”

In fact, we think many Supreme Court cases make terrific, engaging companion texts to some of our most commonly taught literary texts.

For example, we use an excerpt from Loving v. Virginia in Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill A Mockingbird. The case serves as the informational text-center of our unit, “What’s Up with Mr. Dolphus Raymond?” Studying Loving v. Virginia gives students the legal context with which to understand the fact that the white Dolphus Raymond could not legally marry the African-American mother of his children. Scout may or may not be aware of this prohibition, which makes it all the more inaccessible to students today. Reading Loving v. Virginia together with Mockingbird reveals the deeper gravity and historical resonance behind Raymond’s drunken masquerade. Nichols’s Loving surely deserves a place in our classrooms as well (even just the 2 1/2 minute trailer for the film does fine work in unpacking for students the taboos against interracial marriage).

Indeed, reading Mockingbird together with Loving v. Virginia is one way, we think, in which the Common Core helps us engage students in “difficult conversations” (Chadwick 91) about race, class, and social injustice. Jocelyn A. Chadwick references these “difficult conversations” in her excellent discussion of teaching Huckleberry Finn in the November 2016 issue of English Journal. Her essay forms one of several companion pieces to Peter Smagorinsky’s provocative essay on whether it is “time to prohibit Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn” (75).

Leaving aside the issue of teaching Huck, one issue that struck us in the debate in EJ was Smagorinsky’s worry about the Common Core’s “emphasis on reading within the four corners of the page while sublimating emotional responses in service of textual analysis” (80). This worry seems to echo earlier concerns that the Common Core would force English teachers to put aside literature in favor of instructional manuals.

The Common Core, however, asks us to broaden, not narrow, our students’ reading. Students are sometimes asked to read “within the four corners of the page,” but the Common Core also introduced the informational text standard and emphasized the important skill of putting different kinds of texts into critical conversation. Anchor Standard 9, for example, asks students to “Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take” (CCSS, 2010). Explicitly, this standard articulates a reading practice in which students use multiple texts to build an “informative context” that expands beyond any singular close examination of a solitary text.

Particularly for texts like Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn, that informative context can be just as important as the emotional context. Emotional responses to literature can and should retain a place in our classrooms, but we also have a responsibility to help place those responses within the complex and politically difficult historical context that students often can’t access from the literary text alone. After all, Scout and Jem think Dolphus Raymond is a drunk because they have no context within which to understand his actions and behavior. Informational texts, like Loving v. Virginia and Nichols’s Loving, make sure our students don’t make those same mistakes. These companion texts to Mockingbird are crucial tools for us to use in meeting the Common Core Standards, building literacy across a range of text types, and facilitating difficult but critical classroom conversations.

A new school year, a new Mockingbird

EdWeek currently features an inspiring piece by David B. Cohen about teaching Mockingbird. Cohen talks about the ways in which his views and teaching of Harper Lee’s seminal and influential text have changed, particularly in light of his current reading about institutional racism and economic oppression in the historical period of the novel.

Indeed, as Cohen writes, “even if the book stays the same, the reader changes over time.” So his current reading of Mockingbird is different from what it was some twenty years ago, based on who he now is but also what he now knows about the broader context of the novel.

We might amplify Cohen’s important comments with a reminder that the readers of Mockingbird today are not just us, the teachers, but also our students. What broader context and particular reading do students today bring to the table in order to make sense out of Harper Lee’s text? What do we as teachers hope they will take away? How can we help them see the connections between this very historically specific story of Maycombe and today’s American universe, replete with tensions about race, economic inequality, social justice, etc.?

Cohen writes that a text like Mockingbird is never at risk of feeling “stale and overused” because it contains such “rich material.” But he also emphasizes, so rightly, that by “adding relevant new learning,” we “keep the experience fresh.” Indeed, that is the difficult but exciting task of the skilled English teacher.

When we select innovative and engaging informational or nonfiction texts in order to provide a potent context for both us and for those many students for whom Mockingbird can seem an alien text describing a foreign world, we do our jobs well. There is no one Mockingbird; which version of Harper Lee’s novel will you offer your students this year? What texts will you curate for them in order to shape their first or second encounter with what Oprah Winfrey calls “our national novel”?

A note on the passing of Harper Lee

Along with the rest of the world, we mourn the passing of Harper Lee. What she has given to all of us through To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman is immeasurable and will endure. 

We know that readers around the globe will continue to grapple with her complex and challenging vision of race, class, and injustice in American society for generations to come.

Like so many, we owe Harper Lee an enormous debt both as readers and as educators. But personally, we also feel obligated to thank her for the work we have been able to do and the rich conversations we have been so fortunate to have with teachers across the country about Mockingbird over the past few years. Our packed session at NCTE in November, along with Susan Groenke and Robert Prickett, on “Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird in (Not-So) Post-Racial Times” was a thrilling testament to both the enduring relevance of Lee’s landmark novel and to teachers’ continued dedication to engaging students in the critical conversations that both Mockingbird and Watchman inspire.

Thank you, Harper Lee, for inspiring and challenging us all.

Day 1 at NCTE Minneapolis (where it’s very cold)

Getting ready for our packed session on "Teaching To
Kill a Mockingbird in (Not-So) Post-Racial Times"

We arrived bright and early in the morning from New Jersey. One of our first highlights was Brian Sweeney’s discussion of how his high school journalism student was able to turn a quirk in the New York City sexual education policy (teachers could talk about condoms but not actually show them) into a breaking story about policy change that was picked up by national media. Sweeney’s talk was part of a panel about writing forms beyond the essay and student agency. It was an inspiring way to begin our NCTE.

Next, we presented our work on informational text and Mockingbird. The panel, Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird in (Not So) Post-Racial Times was the brainchild of Susan Groenke (thanks to her for that!). We were thrilled to talk to an informed and lively audience about ways to think about Calpurnia and Lula vis-à-vis an audio interview of Dorothy Bolden, who worked as a domestic for 41 years and founded the National Domestic Workers Union in 1968, and excerpts from “Growing Up White,” featuring the reflections of white women who grew up in the 1930s South, like Scout, on the nannies and sharecroppers of their childhoods. If you missed our presentation, our slides are available on our website, as is the unit we focused on, “What Does Scout Really Know About Calpurnia?”

Robert Prickett followed us, with wonderful examples of graphic novels featuring African-American characters and history. We can’t wait to read Jennifer's Journal: The Life of a SubUrban Girl and the many others. Our favorite takeaway from his talk: use just a few panels from these various text to fill in context, make connections, and enrich your classroom discussion of Mockingbird.

Next, Stacy Reece and Susan Groenke talked about their research on pre-service teachers and the teaching of Mockingbird. Their qualitative research on how these students had been taught to read and think about Harper Lee’s novel – Atticus as hero, for example – was so compelling, especially given how universally the students talked about the erasure of race in their experience of the novel in high school.

Their next task was to help these pre-service teachers design lesson plans that would foreground an anti-racist pedagogy. What was so striking about this work was how challenging it was for these young teachers to imagine this work. All new teachers worry about how to handle conflict in the classroom; inviting a politically challenging discussion of race into your classroom is no small feat for a new teacher. But if we don’t help these teachers to think about this work now, when will we? We need our new teachers to take on these challenges; we can ill afford another generation of students who read Mockingbird as an unqualified tale of white heroism.

Thanks also to a great audience for their feedback. There’s no question that Mockingbird remains a problematic text today. Yet we know it remains one of those universally taught texts, so our challenge is to teach it well in combination with other texts that allow our students to have the difficult and informed conversations about race that we need to have in our classrooms.

Finally, we closed our day at a session entitled, “Responding to College Readiness,” featuring Audrey’s colleague, Caroline Wilkinson, along with Susannah Kilbourne and Hollye Wright. This highly interactive session allowed for great discussion of the vexed and vexing topic of college readiness. We did not, as one disappointed audience member noted, leave with the “answers” as to what constitutes college readiness and how to achieve it. But we did take away a sense of the importance of continuing conversations about the academic and non-academic skills necessary for success in college, the academic and non-academic obstacles (particularly poverty), and the difficulty of ensuring real access and opportunity for so many first generation students.

All in all, a great day at NCTE, as usual.

Making sense of 'Watchman' and 'Mockingbird'

Yes, of course, we were first in line for Go Set a Watchman, and we read the new Harper Lee novel eagerly and with great pleasure. We’ve also been following, mostly with delight, the coverage of the text, including Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic, Isabel Wilkerson and Joseph Crespino in The New York Times, and Hadley Freeman in The Guardian.

Instead of weighing in on the novel generally, which is territory well-covered already by so many others, we thought we’d suggest a few ways in which teachers might integrate Watchman into their teaching of Mockingbird.

One of the biggest storylines about Watchman has been the discussion of Atticus as a racist. The mainstream media has covered this development in full sensational mode as if Atticus’s views about race are wholly surprising.

Careful readers of Mockingbird, however, have a sense of how complex the racial politics of Lee’s Maycomb world already are and that the Atticus of that novel is no simple hero. After all, Atticus takes on the defense of Tom Robinson involuntarily, telling his brother “I’d hoped to get through life without a case of this kind, but [Judge] John Taylor pointed at me” (117). He is no civil rights activist: before, during, or after the trial. When Tom is shot in the prison yard for supposedly trying to escape, and shot seventeen times(!), Atticus responds with care for Tom’s family and for the African-American community, but he doesn’t initiate any legal appeal or investigation.

Teachers can help students unpack some of the complexity of Mockingbird’s Atticus. In our Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill a Mockingbird, we offer an excerpt from David Margolick’s “To Attack a Lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird: An Iconoclast Takes Aim at a Hero.” The piece critically evaluates Atticus’s words and actions, analyzing the ways in which his actions are not necessarily so heroic. Moreover, the discussion allows students to think about whether it’s appropriate to judge someone from the past – whether a real-life or fictional character – based on our cultural or social standards today.

With a nuanced and critical understanding of Mockingbird’s Atticus, students will be all the more ready to think about the Atticus we encounter in Watchman who says that the “Negro population is backward” (242) and questions whether “Negroes [belong] in our schools and church and theaters?” (245). Is this Watchman Atticus really incommensurate with the Atticus in Mockingbird who defends Tom Robinson but is fully part and parcel of a community in which African Americans live as wholly second-class citizens in every way?

Brief excerpts from chapter 17 of Watchman, then, together with Margolick’s text, can help students make more sense out of Atticus, and the complex world of the segregated South. As you work this summer to adjust your teaching of Mockingbird post-Watchman, take a look at our Using Informational Text to Teach to Kill a Mockingbird for the Margolick piece and others that can help flesh out that complex world.

Let’s help our students be smarter and more critically thoughtful than most of the mainstream media; it’s not that hard and it’s important, good work!

A new resource for teaching Mockingbird

In the year since our first book, Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill a Mockingbird, was published, we have enjoyed the privilege of sharing our work with teachers around the country and have been gratified to play a role in how they are teaching this ever-relevant and beloved novel.

Like so many others, we eagerly await the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman and wonder how it will impact our perceptions of Scout, Atticus, and life in Maycomb, Alabama, and how it will resonate in the present day as Mockingbird still does so powerfully. In the meantime, we welcome a valuable new resource released in April by the nonprofit organization Facing History and Ourselves, Teaching Mockingbird.

Similar to our volume, Teaching Mockingbird is organized into units centered upon essential questions that guide teachers and students as they study the novel in conjunction with related readings and multimedia resources that help students build the background knowledge needed to access the rich themes throughout Mockingbird. Facing History’s guide also contains a wonderful range of video clips and graphic organizers to engage visual and auditory learners (as our volume does as well).

Having spent a great deal of time searching for engaging, meaningful informational texts in creating our own book on Mockingbird, we applaud the choices in Facing History. Three resources in Teaching Mockingbird are particularly fascinating: the discussions of eugenics, the redneck stereotype, and restorative justice.

Teaching Mockingbird aims to be a comprehensive guide to teaching the novel, with extensive thematic and close reading questions for each chapter of the novel, based on Facing History’s pedagogical approach, foregrounding “adolescent and moral development.” The volume offers a very helpful guide to discussing sensitive topics in the classroom and substantive guidance for teachers on how, when, and why to use the resources included. Teaching Mockingbird begins with a rich pre-reading section on identity, difference, personal voice, and belonging and ends with a rewarding post-reading unit that examines the novel’s legacy and the power of literature to shape the morals and ethics of individuals and society.

Like our Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill a Mockingbird, this new volume offers teachers resources to refresh and enrich their existing Mockingbird curriculum by incorporating engaging, complex, relevant informational texts into their teaching of the novel. Both guides emphasize giving students experience with a wide range of meaningful and relevant nonfiction, developing their skills in making evidence-based inferences and arguments, and enhancing their vocabulary and use of academic language.

Of course, we do have some differences in approach. These can be seen most explicitly in how the two volumes present excerpts from Roosevelt’s first inaugural address. Teaching Mockingbird offers a very short excerpt from the beginning of the address with no resources for addressing challenging words like “candor” or “impel.” On the other hand, our book offers teachers a variety of pre-reading vocabulary activities to front-load both key vocabulary and concepts to pave the way for a successful experience of reading, discussing, and writing about a longer excerpt of the address, while guided reading questions alongside the excerpt follow-up on that pre-reading vocabulary practice, asking students to examine how the words are used in the text.

In addition to reinforcing students’ vocabulary acquisition, the guided reading questions that appear directly alongside each informational text in our book draw students’ attention to key textual features and concepts within the text. Each reading is followed by writing and discussion questions that put the informational text into meaningful dialogue with the novel; some units also feature a creative class activity that can be used as a capstone project for the study of the informational text itself or the novel overall.

Our differences reflect our sense that informational text poses specific and substantial challenges to students, particularly in relation to vocabulary and textual features and format. We also want to emphasize the importance of students engaging in rich and evidence-based dialogue as they put these informational texts into conversation with Mockingbird.

Clearly, Teaching Mockingbird, like our UsingInformational Text to Teach Literature, offers teachers and students the opportunity to meet the standards of the Common Core with a range of high quality, complex texts that will invigorate our understanding of this rewarding and relevant novel for years to come.