This book contains four essays written over twenty-eight years ago while I was teaching writing and literature in the secondary school classroom. The four essays I have included here, published in various English journals over the years, represent what I once believed were original and effective approaches to teaching writing and literature.

I do not wish to make apologies for the unpolished prose style of the essays or for arguments I once would have avidly defended, but today no longer stir a whole lot of zeal in me. I offer them to you as they appeared in the journals and anthologies. Hopefully a new generation of English teachers will find a few of the ideas contained in the essays of some value today.