Mister James Teaches English

"Araby" is a short story by James Joyce  (PDF) published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. On the purely narrative level the story traces a young boy's infatuation with his friend's sister. On the symbolic level Araby traces the development of the boy as he turns his back on the certainties of childhood and Catholicism and embraces the uncertainties of adult emotions and desires via imagination. Araby is structured in a way that first introduces the childhood world of the narrator, the boy of the story. It is a mysterious but exciting world where even simple things take on great significance, relative to the small size of the world - a single street really. But the story also opens with death, and the abandoned house of the recently deceased, but 'charitable' priest. This death can be understood as the loss of faith and the end of childhood. From there we look forward as readers through what is possibly the first steps into the adult world by the boy telli...

First, second, and third person are ways of describing points of view. First person  is the  I/we  perspective. Second person  is the  you  perspective. Third person  is the  he/she/it/they  perspective. More information here

  11-year-old Charlie Bucket, his parents, and four grandparents all live in poverty in a small house outside of town. One day, Charlie's Grandpa Joe tells him about the legendary and eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka and all the wonderful sweets he made until the other chocolatiers sent in spies to steal his secret recipes, forcing Wonka to close the factory to outsiders. The next day, the newspaper announces that Wonka is re-opening the factory and has invited five lucky children to come on a tour after finding a Golden Ticket in a Wonka Bar. The story was originally inspired by Roald Dahl's experience of chocolate companies during his schooldays. Cadbury would often send test packages to the schoolchildren in exchange for their opinions on the new products. At that time (around the 1920s), Cadbury and Rowntree's were England's two largest chocolate makers and they each often tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies, posing as employees, into the other's fact...

The older students have started working on a module that is called Reading for Culture. It is made up of the following themes: What is Culture? We will be identifying culture through the course, so I do not want to add a big definition here. However, it may be enough to say that culture is how you understand the world around you and how you are understood by those around you. This idea will be developed through background readings and discussion that focus on culture in daily life, what cultures do students experience and witness, do students have a close affinity or participate in any particular cultures? The major goal of this course is to identifying cultures in texts; this consist of reading and discussions around set texts. We will be reading articles, stories and novels with the goal or focus of identifying culture and cultural elements in a complex text. These cultures are made up of elements that operate under broad headings such as: Work - how is work represented or referred ...

Jacquline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming speaks about the writing process Brown Girl Dreaming and The American Civil Rights Movement The Civil Rights Movement was a multi-decade movement intended to achieve equal rights and treatment for African Americans. The movement is considered to have taken place from 1954–1968, though it drew on a long history of protest against the mistreatment of African Americans. As Woodson notes multiple times in the book, even after the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, Jim Crow laws and general prejudice prevented African Americans from equal treatment in many arenas. Many see the end of World War II as the impetus for the Civil Rights movement. Many African Americans fought in World War II, a war predicated upon the United States's commitment to freedom. This made the blatant discrimination they faced upon returning home to the United States all the more salient. Tensions from the post-war 1940s spilled ...