Describes the Bernard Haldane System for Identifying Motivated Skills, an English course integrating job seeking skills with freshman composition and rhetoric instruction. An achievement essay, classification essays, and research essays precede preparation of resumes, application letters, and interview techniques. (HTH)

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)

Stresses the importance of showing students a reason for learning writing skills, not just a "because." Argues that credibility is everything and that proving this is crucial to successfully producing writers who can not only write, but care about their writing. (RAE)

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

Describes how literature teachers can enliven Shakespeare's "Macbeth" by performing Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking episode (Act 5, Scene 1) with their class. Provides a lesson plan to set up and discuss the performance. Notes that this lesson lets students view a Shakespearean play from both theatrical and academic perspective. (MM)

Describes a final writing assignment in which students themselves must propose a writing assignment and rationale for future use in the classroom. The assignment forces students to examine what they have learned in the course and gives the teacher some insight into what has not been taught successfully. (HTH)

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)