From: Holly A. Schoenecker <hollys>
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 09:20:09 -0500

Thank you Betty Ihlenfeldt (sorry if I misspelled your last name). I laughed out loud and copied your "word warriorship." But on a serious note, when I taught high school, we were instructed to gear down the expectations: all students had to succeed, and if succeeding meant going from an anthology with 8 page stories to one with 2 page stories, okay. [And the result: some 2 page stories are great, and some don't yield much material for discussion.]
   Now, as a college instructor, my students are asking, "Where was this story?" or "This is really great. Why did't we read this person in high school?" Sometimes they did: their non-memory is a combination of, I believe, not being in the right place in their lives to live into the story, or of reading the story through worksheets. One English teacher taught _To Kill a Mockingbird_ with worksheets 5x the book's thickness. (Her students
"hated" the book.)
   Have your found that one story leads to another: with stories there is a mention, a shadow, of something else that leads us on. The character reads a book; the introduction notes a similar story; they author says, "I was inspired by ___." And we follow this thread through the wood.
Received on Sat 26 Jul 1997 09:20:09 AM CDT