Teaching Huckleberry Finn : Why and How to Present the Controversial Classic in the High School Classroom Paperback / softback

I am not sure I would call myself a scholar, yet I doubt there are many educators in America who have taken Mark Twain’s work into the places I have and come out on the other side.

In the current political climate, I’m fearful that books that challenge us like Huckleberry Finn—books that are controversial—will be abandoned for fear of that controversy, the idea of upsetting some mom or some well-meaning, ill-informed school board member.

Don’t teach the best stuff, teach the least offensive, things no one will object to—or remember.

But wouldn’t Huck’s hard-scrabble life fit perfectly at my school?

If Huck was alive, wouldn’t he go to my school? Wouldn’t Huck’s life strike a sadly familiar chord with so many of these young people raised by a single mom or a grandma, a Dad unknown or incarcerated, a long, sad trail of trouble stretching in every direction?

Wouldn’t they find—didn’t they need—a moral compass in their own lives to mirror the one in this extraordinary tale of two absolute misfits who cared about each other; one willing to go, as he so movingly says, “to Hell” to help the other?