Edutopia – Erin Medeiros
“To many students, the work of learning in the language arts classroom can feel amorphous, indefinite, everlasting, but rarely immediate or complete. For me, that’s a joy; I love the endless source material and challenges we can tackle to advance our learning through language study. For a lot of teenagers, though, language arts classes can be frustratingly open-ended. I hung Roland Barthes’s observation that “literature is the question minus the answer” above the board in my AP English Literature class for the several years I taught it. Every year, I know, there were kids who just wanted to finish something, get a right answer, open and shut the book.” (more)