Irony can be a lot of fun to teach, but it can also be really challenging for students to wrap their minds around. It’s important for all students to understand, though, because it forms the basis for large swaths of our popular culture, and unlike other literary devices, when we misunderstand (or miss altogether) an author’s use of irony, we run the risk of taking away the opposite meaning than the one the author intended.
We’re not going to find a foolproof way to keep our students from using ChatGPT or detect it when they do: ChatGPT is a better writer than many students who have come through our doors. What we can do, however, is require students to include enough specific elements in their writing assignments that ChatGPT will be unlikely to provide a perfect response.
Symbolism can be a real can of worms for any English teacher. On the one hand, symbols are often challenging for students to find, wrap their minds around, and explain meaningfully. On the other hand, budding literary scholars love to go “symbol hunting,” identifying anything and everything as a symbol, sometimes with wild results.
Textbooks, novel selections, these things are s-l-o-w to change in the ELA world. It seems there’s never enough money to…
It’s time for the next installment in our series featuring our favorite short stories for high school students! Correctly identifying a text’s point of view is crucial to any prose analysis and yet it’s something students really struggle with.
Teaching poetry is simultaneously one of the most rewarding and most challenging things we do as English teachers. Its compactness means it is rich with literary devices, creating powerful effects that speak to significant human truths and experiences. However, this can also make it seem indecipherable upon first (and sometimes second) glance, which often leads students to dismiss it as boring because they aren’t getting the instant gratification of immediate understanding.