The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

"He also said that I should use the vocabulary words that I learn in class like 'corpulent' and 'jaundice.' I would use them here, but I dont' rthink they are appropriate in this format.
To tell you the truth, I don't know where they are appropriate to use. I"m not saying that you shouldn't know them. You should absolutely. But I just have never heard anyone use the words 'corpulent' and 'jaundice' ever in my life. That includes teachers. So, what's the point of using words nobody else knows or can say comfortablly? I just don't understand that." (p.14)

"Charlie, we accept the love we think we deserve." (p.24)

"[...] even if we don't have the power to choose wheere we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them." (p.211)

"I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won't tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn't change the fact that they were upset." (p.211)

Squirrels in the Springtime

"...our observations of the grading phenomenon in writing classes echo those of researcher Paul Diederich, who says that the classes he visits are 'fantastically over-evaluated,' with teachers 'piling [grades] up like squirrels gather nuts'".





~Dornan et al. (2003). Within and Beyond the Writing Process in the Secondary English Classroom. Pearson Education Group, Inc.: Boston.

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Teaching difficult issues

"You can't teach a book like Huckleberry Finn without asking if the book is racist, if Twain is racists, if I, as the teacher who invited it into the classroom, am racist. It means stopping the class when the Armenian student hurls the insult at the Turkish student, or when one gender generalizes about another in a hurtful way. It means seeing cheating as an opportunity to discuss moral capacity and personal integrity by explaining how they have diminished...their word in my realm from that point on.

"I'm not naive about all this. Just because we talk or I say something doesn't mean anything changes. However, it is the discussion of what is right and wrong, the growth of moral intelligence that counts. We cannot make our students act 'better,' but we can put them at the center of such essential conversations and, by allowing students to occupy the lives of others--through literature--help them develop the habit of asking themselves such questions."

~Jim Burke quoted in Teaching Literature to Adolescents (2006), edited by Beach, Appleman, Hynds, & Wilhelm

Being a critical reader

"...although literature can help readers to understand what it means to be human, readers must also take responsibility for interpreting the political messages of texts. Yet teachers are rarely taught to read children's and young adult literature as political texts nor are they encouraged to read bibliographic resources with a critical eye."

~Cynthia Lewis. "Critical issues: limits of identification: the personal, pleasurable and critical in reader response." JLR. (2000). V. 32 No. 2. p. 253-266

Truth

"Literature can take you into a world by showing you how people actually see things. Young adulthood is a time of transition; it means coming of age. You become an independent actor out in the world"

~Michael Cart. (1996). From Romance to Realism: 50 years of growth and change in young adult literature. Harper.

Literature creates community

"I believe it is literature--whether imported from other lands in other languages, imported in translation written in English in this country by immigrants who describe the invention of their new selves here or recall the realities of their former lives in the lands of their national origin--that will prove to be the place of light, the neutral center where all of us can go to find out about each other and, come to think about it, about our selves as well. 'We' need to read about 'them' and 'they' need to read about 'us,' and perhaps we will find, thus, that we are all, simply, 'we.'"

~Michael Cart. (1996). From Romance to Realism: 50 years of growth and change in young adult literature. Harper.