Our campus technology committee has discussed -- only in theory so far -- the possibile integration of laptops in the classroom at Seton Hill. In my research for this I found something that surprised me: Stephen King, advocating for them, and volunteering to do distance learning to teach a middle school class.

Apparently, today news reports are saying that King recently had to back out. But I hope he decides to return to this idea. King, who was struggling to make a living as a teacher before he sold his first book, CARRIE, seems to realize that literacy is the key to the future of publishing, whether online or off. And he's a strong advocate for education. I think a lot of people don't realize how much he "pays it forward" or gives back to the community like this. He's opened up a library in Bangor, Maine. He's written books about how to write (like On Writing) and how to understand the genre (like Dance Macabre). King is a teacher as much as he's the bestselling author of all time. He's a great role model for literacy. And I admire that.

Conversely, I count myself among the growing number of teachers across the country who have taught Stephen King. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to realize that if you choose a popular author to teach in an English course, you increase the likelihood of getting students interested in reading. My experiences teaching Night Shift (in a "horror fiction writing" course), Misery (in a graduate level seminar), and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (in a seminar on childhood in literature) were all VERY successful. In fact, the Misery seminar stemmed largely from my dissertation scholarship and working on Tom Gordon with students helped me generate an article for the NY Review of Science Fiction a year or two ago. King plays a large role in what I do as a teacher and a scholar and a writer!

It's no secret that King seems to have some reservations about his own relation to the canon of literature, but I think this anxiety comes with the realization of how powerful he really is, and how influential he is over young readers. He's written about schools quite a bit (think of his novella "Apt Pupil" which is about education in a way, or that infamous "Rage" story his Bachman persona wrote that presaged Columbine). He seems very tuned in to the adolescent mind and is very savvy about teaching things to his audience whether it be directly or indirectly.

Do a google search for "Stephen King Lesson Plan" and you'll find lots of resources for teaching King. An outline from the state of Michigan on teaching horror fiction to high schoolers is particularly impressive.

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