These articles look at the difficulty of teaching literacy in secondary schools and the reasons content-area teachers may balk when asked to teach reading explicitly.

A high school teacher describes an assignment in which students study the histories and social reception of words (in some cases considered obscenities) used to insult people of various social categories. Students come to recognize the powerful, sometimes damaging effects of language, enabling them to fight those effects intellectually. Many derogatory terms are cited as examples in this essay.

Book Love addresses student apathy head on, first by recognizing why students don't read assigned readings or for pleasure. The book provides advice for helping students find books that are right for them, building in time to read, reflect, and share. The website provides workshop handouts, reading lists, videos, etc. In the article, “Let them read, please” Penny describes what it takes to build a culture of reading in secondary schools.

Learn how to make inferences in literature, nonfiction and real life, and to support those inferences with strong, reliable evidence.

An inference is just coming to a logical conclusion from whatever evidence you have. It’s one of the most valuable thinking skills you can learn.

The ability to make inferences is one of the things that make a person what we call “smart.” And we say the person who can’t make inferences is “a little slow on the uptake,” right?, because other people figure out what’s going on more quickly than he or she does. We have to spell things out explicitly for that person.

So, when your teacher says he or she is going to help you learn how to make good inferences, imagine in your head that he or just said that you’re going to learn how to be smart today. You’re going to learn how to think, because, ultimately, that’s what making inferences is all about.

Students participate in learning clubs, select content area topics, and draw on texts - including websites, printed material, video, and music - to investigate their topics, and share their learning using similar media.

Learning to read in an alphabetic language such as English is a complex task and, for most children, requires explicit teaching. In particular, an extensive body of research has demonstrated that, in the initial stages of learning to read, children benefit from systematic teaching about the connections between letters and sounds, known as phonics.

Students learn more about Faulkner's life and the culture of the South while exploring the use of multiple voices in narration.

Published in 1929, "The Sound and the Fury" is often referred to as William Faulkner's first work of genius. Faulkner's style is characterized by frequent time shifts, narrator shifts, unconventional punctuation and sentence structure, as well as a stream-of-consciousness technique that reveals the inner thoughts of characters to the reader. This curriculum unit will examine narrative structure and time, narrative voice/point of view, and symbolism throughout "The Sound and the Fury."

Reading Emily Dickinson's letters alongside her poems helps students to better appreciate a remarkable voice in American literature, grasp how Dickinson perceived herself and her poetry, and perhaps most relevant to their own endeavors consider the ways in which a writer constructs a "supposed person."

Uncover the sources of Twain's comic genius in American traditions of dialect humor and literary satire.

Curriculum unit of three lessons explores Williams's use of expressionism to more fully comprehend the theatrical devices and themes in The Glass Menagerie. In Lesson 1, students identify and explicate Williams' expressionist techniques.

In this lesson, students will explore Dickinson's poem "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" both as it was published as well as how it developed through Dickinson's correspondence with her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson.

Lesson 2 is a study of symbols in William Golding's novel "Lord of the Flies." After reviewing the general concept of symbolism, students focus on four of the most dominant symbols that permeate the novel: the island itself; the conch; the Lord of the Flies effigy; fire.

This lesson prompts students to think about a poem's speaker within the larger context of modernist poetry. First, students will review the role of the speaker in two poems of the Romanticism period before focusing on the differences in Wallace Stevens' modernist"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

In this lesson, students closely examine Dickinson's poem "There's a certain slant of light" in order to understand her craft. Students explore different components of Dickinson's poetry and then practice their own critical and poetry writing skills in an emulation exercise. Finally, in the spirit of Dickinson's correspondences, students will exchange their poems and offer informed critiques of each others' work.

In this lesson, students examine the use of multiple voices in narration while also exploring the use of symbolism.

In "The Sound and The Fury," Faulkner's presentation of time is unique and complex, as the Quentin chapter symbolically opens with a description of Quentin's watch, which was given to him by his father.

By studying other female characters in "The Awakening," students will see how Chopin carefully provides many examples of a socially acceptable "role" that Edna could adopt.

Lesson 3 guides students through Melville's seamless integration of several literary genres"”sermon, scientific writing, drama, and hymn"”and moves into an analytical discussion of "Moby-Dick" as a masterwork that goes above and beyond the appeal of its fictional genre.