The one book every English teacher needs to read

Go to a scary place

You can get along just fine without ever reading Hamlet.  Dulce et decorum est is just one of many poems.  There are other great novels besides Great Expectations.

But if there’s one book that ought to be required reading for every English teacher everywhere, it’s Into The Woods by John Yorke.

Act like you get it

I have the standard English teacher background of a Lit and Lang degree.  But in some ways, university English is a smaller subject than the English we teach in schools.  Undergraduate readers are often required to take a narrower view of texts, and one aspect of literature that falls by the wayside is narrative structure.

I’m happy to admit that until three or four years ago I had nothing intelligent to say about Shakepeare’s five act structure beyond a stale comment on the length of early modern…