Category: literacy, literature, and language
-
From Bad to Worse
Current educational challenges are bad enough without the Chicago Tribune making these worse, which it did with its recent editorial. In it, its editorial board admonishes “emboldened” teachers who are pressuring students to accept teachers’ politics or be excluded from classroom communities, which it argues deprives these students of their rights. It argues that such…
-
More Like a Summer Slurpee
NPR critic Maureen Corrigan suggests that El Dorado Drive by Megan Abbott (2025) is one of the better summer suspense novels, but I think it barely qualifies as a beach read. Harper, the youngest of three Bishop sisters, is invited by her older sisters Pam and Deb to join a female financial club that seems…
-
A Need to Read?
Gloria Edim’s (2024) new memoir is a project in search of a problem. The book is a series of thematic chapters loosely organized in chronological order. These offer clusters of experiences, and the ways that reading helped her think through and about these. Edim’s claim to fame is the the Well-Read Black Girl organization, which…