English Teacher Weekly for June 5th
Welcome to English Teacher Weekly—your source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities.
Apologies for the unscheduled break last week, the first in ETW history. Let’s just say that the last week of school hit a little harder than I expected. But after 124 editions, I figure that I’m due for a fumble. Thank you for your patience.
This week marks the beginning of summer break for me, which means a literal and figurative clearing out of our storage shed. Work I’ve long put off, but now the time has finally come.
Enjoy this week’s edition!
Hard or Easy Poems
For Plough, Stephen Akey considers the role of accessibility in poetry. Does a poem require some necessary reading resistance for it to work its magic? Should a poem feel easy or difficult? Along the way he employs the work of T.S. Eliot as well as the anthology Good Poems, curated by
.For the record, I love both. My college roommate gave me a copy of Eliot’s The Wasteland as a birthday gift over twenty years ago. I cherish it to this day. And I’ve probably given a dozen copies of Good Poems away over the years.
I think I find myself agreeing with Akey here:
T. S. Eliot has surely lodged himself into my consciousness, and I will probably read The Waste Land again. There are many beautiful passages that will always move and engage me, even when I only half understand them. And if I fully understood them – if Eliot had cast those passages in simpler diction and homey metaphors – I expect I would be less rather than more engaged. Eliot met his moment and wrote in the difficult manner that, he believed, social, cultural, and literary circumstances made obligatory. But struggling to reconstruct his buried narrative and fractured thematics (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) is not something I relish in the way I once did.
By contrast, his contemporary Robert Frost didn’t feel compelled to shore any fragments against his ruins, yet Frost’s poetry feels authentically modern, which is to say: it’s harder than it seems. Although Frost sometimes did write in rhymed tetrameters, anyone who can breeze through “The Silken Tent” (one sentence cast as a Petrarchan sonnet and governed by a metaphorical conceit as “metaphysical” as anything by John Donne) is not paying attention. And paying attention is, perhaps more than anything else, what poetry asks of us. That’s what makes the reading of poetry so intensely collaborative. Still, I’ll admit to moments of frustration when the attention required seems incommensurate with the benefits accrued. Ever tried getting through Ezra Pound’s Cantos?
The Freedom of Writing and Reading
Novelist and a 2025 Guggenheim fellow Nicole Krauss in her speech at Ben-Gurion University a couple of weeks ago, republished in The Washington Post and titled “The end of writing and reading will be the end of freedom.”
I am a writer in a long line of writers, among my people and all people who have been writing these last few thousand years. And I write, just as I read, because I believe that in the realm of literature we are, each of us, free. Free to imagine, to invent, to change our minds, to travel through time, across space, to feel and experience the full breadth of ourselves, and to do what I don’t believe can be done in any other realm, medium or dimension: to step into the mind of another. Feel what it is to live inside another and, in the process, enlarge ourselves beyond the borders of selfhood, into the vaster fields of mutual understanding and empathy. As such, literature is fundamentally democratic but for one major caveat: To access its freedoms, we must be taught to read, value and engage with literature.
How Ivan's Death Gave Me Life
upon first reading Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”:The result of that story’s impact on my thinking was so profound that it literally changed a foundational belief I’d held onto. I had to confess the sin of thinking that didacticism is the best (and only real) means of teaching and learning things that matter. I had to repent of the very dead and wooden view which kept me from being able to understand many truths on a deeper and more experiential level than I ever had before. Story was a vehicle for communicating the very same things I already cared about, but it could do it in a way that would leave a deeper and more indelible impression upon my soul than mere didactic teaching ever could.
What a fool I had been.
For more on “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” I recommend
’s series on the story from this past winter. His collection of commentaries on classic Russian short stories, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, remains one of my favorite pieces of literary criticism from the past few years.Longer Books, Faster Reading
A study from the University of Sussex tried something a little different than the typical reading intervention which seems to have had a large effect on struggling young readers. They replaced shorter texts taught at a slower pace with longer texts read at a faster pace.
Poorer adolescent readers are often regarded by teachers as unable to read whole narratives and given short, simplified texts, yet are expected to analyse every part in a slow laborious read through. This article reports on a mixed methods study in which 20 English teachers in the South of England changed their current practice to read two whole challenging novels at a faster pace than usual in 12 weeks with their average and poorer readers ages 12-13. Ten teachers received additional training in teaching comprehension. Students in both groups made 8.5 months’ mean progress on standardised tests of reading comprehension, but the poorer readers made a surprising 16 months progress but with no difference made by the training programme. Simply reading challenging, complex novels aloud and at a fast pace in each lesson repositioned ‘poorer readers’ as ’good’ readers, giving them a more engaged uninterrupted reading experience over a sustained period. However, the qualitative data showed that teachers with the additional training provided a more coherent faster read and better supported poorer readers by explicitly teaching inference, diagnosed students’ ‘sticking places’ mid-text and created socially cohesive guided reading groups that further supported weaker readers but also stretched the average/good readers.
David Perell interviews Ezra Klein on writing as a “technology of rigor.” Perell’s podcast has moved into a top position as one of my favorites about the craft of writing.
Russell Moore and Andrew Peterson discuss the authors that deepened their faith: Lewis, Beuchner, Berry, and more.
Song Exploder takes a break from their typical analyses of pop songs to interview Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy about his book How to Write One Song, his examination of the songwriting process—one of the best “creative process” books I’ve ever read.
Andy Crouch and Jonathan Haidt in conversation: “A person is a heart, soul, mind, strength complex designed for love. And one of the really damaging things about our technology is very little of our technology develops all four of those qualities.”
Chef Dave Chang hosts Will Guidara, restauranteur and author of Unreasonable Hospitality. His book documents the rise of Eleven Madison Park, one of New York’s finest restaurants. The secret to its success was a radical commitment to hospitality. It’s a business book with lots of potential applications to education and beyond. Inspiring work.
Sam Fragoso talks with Ira Glass, founder and host of the iconic radio show This American Life, about 30 years of story-telling and journalism excellence.
’s Bari Weiss interviews Ross Douthat about his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Douthat’s apologetics seem uniquely suited for our times, and Weiss is an excellent interviewer.
For Aeon, Robert D Zaretsky on Stendhal syndrome. Also known as Florence syndrome, it’s a condition wherein a beautiful piece of art can cause a viewer to faint.
Though yet to be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5, 2013), the syndrome nevertheless seems to be real. Every year, a few dozen tourists to Florence are rushed to the local hospitals, literally overcome by the city’s array of paintings, sculptures, frescoes and architecture. Some lose their bearings, others lose their consciousness, yet others still, on rare occasions, nearly lose their lives. In 2018, a heart attack befell an Italian tourist, Carlo Olmastroni, as he gazed at Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi. (His life was saved by four other tourists, all doctors, who had also been standing and staring, slack-jawed, at the Botticelli.)
(Listen: I’m a believer in art’s capacity to transfix, but make sure you’re well hydrated before spending a hot, crowded afternoon in the Uffizi or the Louvre.)
A NYT quiz (gift link): Before They Were Famous: Do You Know the Early Jobs of These Authors?
- defends adverbs: “Now to move swiftly and vigorously back to adverbs. I’ve always bristled at the blanket ban on adverbs. They are a part of our language. We’re writers. Why would we want to limit ourselves by eliminating an entire part of speech from our toolkit?”
- continues her Book Talks series with an interview with her dad, a veteran teacher, about teaching Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
From the WSJ, Colleges are reverting to the classic blue books for, you know, the obvious reasons:
Sales of blue books this school year were up more than 30% at Texas A&M University and nearly 50% at the University of Florida. The improbable growth was even more impressive at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the past two academic years, blue-book sales at the Cal Student Store were up 80%.
The NYT reviews Peace is a Shy Thing, a new biography of Tim O’Brien, one of the most highly regarded American chroniclers of the Vietnam War—“His biographer does not try to redeem him. It’s hard to imagine that O’Brien, the most unsparingly honest and self-flagellating of writers, would accept anything less.”
- on “how to curate you personal canon”—“Remember: a personal canon isn’t a checklist of ‘essential’ works or a trophy case of cultural capital. It’s a record of the things that have shaped you—intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically. It’s personal by definition and unfinished by design.”
“Hot Girl Summer, literary edition: an aesthetic and a booklist”—
celebrates the literature of spirited women making questionable choices in the summertime.From NPR: “Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenyan literary giant who fought colonialism, dies at 87”
"If Africa is going to contribute something original to the world, this must be rooted not only in the experience but also in the possibilities inherent in their own languages," he said. "We have been brought up to think of our many languages as something which is bad. And it's the other way around. Monolingualism suffocates. It is a bad thing. Language contact is the oxygen of civilization."
NYT’s list of summer Shakespeare productions around the US. (gift link)
From The WSJ: At Life Tabernacle in Baton Rouge, LA, young men don’t just attend Bible studies. They learn how to maintain a weed whacker.
From McSweeney’s: “Math Problems for English Majors” by E.Y. Smith.
If, on Monday, two Brontë sisters fancy the same Byronic hero, then by Sunday, how many Brontë sisters will be happy? Will it be the same number of Brontë sisters who were happy before Monday?
…
Ellen has five times the dowry as her sister Charlotte, but Charlotte is twice as attractive as Ellen, and three times as funny. How many times will each sister reject her initial suitor until each finally marries her initial suitor? What if this is a Jane Austen novel?
I’m grateful for the great curation you do. I’m excited to dive deeper into these articles.
Thanks so much for linking to my post! A great round up as usual! Accessibility in poetry is something I think about frequently when I read modern poetry. I have a book on the subject highly recommended by someone I respect--The Chequer'd Shade: Reflections on Obscurity in Poetry by John Press. I haven't read it yet, but the Plough article is pushing me to pick it up.