Suggests open-ended study questions distributed early in the semester and later used on literature exams that will promote independent thinking and develop students' interpretive skills, while at the same time indicating whether the students have benefited fully from reading, lectures, and discussion. (HTH)

Provides a series of suggestions to help students in poetry writing classes move past those periods when ideas for poems seem to have stopped flowing. (TJ)

Suggests an activity that helps students see the relationship of suffixes to particular parts of speech. (TJ)

Provides a guide for teaching Edwin Morgan's poem, "O Pioneers!" (TJ)

Suggests teaching Bernard Malamud's novel, "The Natural," because it is a work of a powerful imagination; can be used to stimulate searches into history, literature, and myth; and can be a catalyst for student writing. Describes several approaches to studying the book. (TJ)

Recommends helping poor spellers improve by having them copy 100-word paragraphs, gradually decreasing the amount of time permitted for perfect copying. (TJ)

Suggests the use of parody to deepen students' understanding of how and why poems work. (TJ)

Recommends a series of six exercises designed to help students become familiar with a number of different resources in a school library. (TJ)

Suggests a way to motivate students' writing and thinking by having them react to critics of novels, plays, or short stories. (TJ)

Recommends a process by which students learn to revise their own papers using a series of guidelines and questions. (TJ)

Describes an exercise in which students cut out T-shirt drawings, sort the T-shirts into groups, and "write" a classification essay by pasting the T-shirts on sheet of paper. The T-shirts in each group become the examples used in one body paragraph of the classification essay. (HTH)

Describes an activity in which students must invent graffiti that might have been written by one of the characters studied in the class's literature assignments. (HTH)

Recommends teaching Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" by using a grammatical approach to the reading. (TJ)

Suggests a method using mathematics to help students begin to understand how they can recognize their own opinion and claim credit for it. (TJ)

Describes the use of a crossword puzzle for testing students for content in a Greek mythology course. Includes a sample crossword puzzle. (TJ)