This article describes an unlikely collaboration between a high school chemistry teacher and a high school English teacher who attempted to teach scientific concepts through poetry. Inspired by poet John Updike's (1960) "Cosmic Gall," these two teachers crafted writing tasks aimed at teaching science content through literary devices. The result…

In this article, we examine John Updike's short story "A&P" and its depiction of the grocery store as a curricular space re/presenting consumption and resistance to it. We position Updike's fictional A&P as a space where the "big curriculum" (Schubert, 2006a) of consumption is enacted in everyday life and explore both how the curriculum of…

The art of fiction tells truth because it is the truth of life that goes into making good fiction: love, hate, fear, courage, delight, sorrow, betrayal, loyalty, confusion, choice, circumstance, luck, injustice. These essential qualities, says the author, are also the qualities of sound theology, with a sense of time and place; and raising…

Uses John Updike's Shillington" to show how an explication-teaching strategy can help students to understand a poem. (SW)

Compares the imagery of two poems that deal with the price exacted by athletic success: John Updike's "Ex-Basketball Player" and A. E. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young." (RBW)

Considers how teaching John Updike's short story "A & P" to treat issues of class and gender provides practice in reading for multiple meanings. Discusses students' responses to the character "Sammy" and considers issues from personal response to reading the text. Notes multiple perspectives and ways of teaching "A & P." (SC)

This article argues for the use of literary texts in teacher education. Discussed are John Updike's "Roger's Version" and Margaret Laurence's "A Jest of God," which illuminate two difficult problems facing teachers: intellectual paternalism and emotional distancing. (IAH)

Presents junior and senior high school teachers' suggestions for short stories to read aloud in a single class period, including "The Laughing Man" (J. D. Salinger), "A & P" (John Updike), "Epicac" (Kurt Vonnegut), "The Story of an Hour" (Kate Chopin), and "The Yellow Wallpaper" (Charlotte…

Considers many ways to teach Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Explores the ironic implications of Macomber's experience and compares it with the experience of Sammy in another initiation story, John Updike's "A&P." Describes how he leads the discussion about this story, and ends the discussion by…

This workbook contains ten short stories by modern masters aimed at young adult readers, with each story followed by a concise lesson on a basic element of literature (such as plot, setting, or mood) clearly illustrated in the story. Some of the authors represented in the book are John Updike, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carson McCullers, and Ray…

The stereotype of the Jewish woman as presented in the media--either a female who controls through guilt and is overly concerned with food, or a woman who is an exotic, seductive individual torn between devotion to family and pursuit of private romantic goals--is discussed in this paper. Books by Norman Mailer, John Updike, Erica Jong and Philip…

The stasis, stock, kinetic, spectator, and dialectic responses to literature all serve to deny the popular misconception that literary analysis invariably deals a death blow to the vitally engaged, spontaneous, and thus authentic response. Stasis is a response in which an intuited imaginative identity between subject and object develops in an…

Following a brief summary of research relating to midlife crisis, a theory of the midlife crisis is presented that is based on the philosophical insights of Plato and Heidegger: The emotional pain at midlife is associated with a collapse of a person's ontic field (relationships with others, to things, and to institutions) or a stagnation of a…

The punctuation system presented in this paper has explanatory power insofar as it explains how good writers punctuate. The paper notes that good writers have learned, through reading, the differences among a hierarchy of marks and acquired a sense of independent clauses that allows them to use the hierarchy, along with a reader-sensitive notion…

Intended to help teachers integrate writing instruction with the study of literature, this teaching guide offers a philosophy of writing instruction, describes a procedure for teaching reading and writing lessons, and provides a sequence of writing skills. For various literature selections, the guide defines vocabulary, provides topic discussion…