A Music Box, Minstrel Songs, & Mark Twain’s Emo Playlist
Mark Twain’s complicated relationship with music reveals much about his writing process, personality, politics, and family relationships.
Tag: Education
21st-Century Students Respond to Sensitive Texts
EDITOR’S NOTE: Last week, Jocelyn Chadwick responded to the recent removal of “sensitive texts,” including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the curriculum in Duluth Public Schools by asking “When will WE listen?” This week, Dr. Chadwick and John E. Grassie, co-authors of Teaching Literature in the Context of Literacy Instruction, share with us the voices of some of the students who they have been listening to as they tour U.S. classrooms. In so […]
When Will WE Listen? Mark Twain Through the Lenses of Generation Z
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Duluth Public School District in Minnesota recently decided to drop two novels from their curriculum, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird. Jocelyn Chadwick, current President of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and a former Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, is both an expert on secondary education in the U.S. and an acclaimed scholar of Mark Twain, having authored The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn. She […]
The Apocryphal Twain: “I have never let schooling interfere with my education.”
As we near the end of fall term, the days get shorter, the mornings get colder, and students, teachers, and parents alike get increasingly agitated. Under such conditions, the problems of our schools, real and imagined, are magnified and exaggerated. November is a ripe season for anti-intellectualism and dozens of Tweeters turn every day to one of the most enduring apocryphal aphorisms of America’s leading iconoclast: I have never let […]