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.

Characterization is one of the most important literary devices you can focus on when you read short stories with your students. Really, at its heart, characterization is the point of literature. Whether we’re reading to escape, to learn, to feel, or to experience, well-developed characters are essential.