Short and Sweet

I'd like to use this post to talk about an underrated type of text and that is the short story.   Speaking for myself, this is not really my favorite type of thing to read. If a story is well written then the longer the better is how I feel.  I like to really immerse myself in this world the text is creating and get lost in it for awhile.

But alas not everyone is like me (in case my tone isn't coming through clearly, that's sarcasm-I am immensely grateful that not everyone is like me).  This was made very clear when I introduced our first anchor book, The Outsiders, to my classes this year.  "What!?"  "We will read this in 4 weeks??"  "No way!"  "It's sooo long."  Are just a sampling of the reactions I received.  When we did in fact finish the book in 4 weeks students were amazed.

But it made me wonder, if students are overwhelmed by the length of novels, how can I still get them to read on their own time?  The answer is simple.  The short story.  I would guess that many students stop reading around the middle school level because this is when books start to get long (my best estimate of what a middle-school student would think is long is anything over about 75 pages).  It starts to feel overwhelming.  They can no longer finish a story in one setting and they may not be interested in returning to the same text multiple times.  The obvious exception being you have found the perfect book to peak that students interest.

In the meantime, the short story may be the way to go.  Short stories need to stop being weird quirks of literature found only in English anthologies and start becoming more mainstream.  As I've been on a Roald Dahl kick I just finished his collection of short stores The Umbrella Man and other short stories.  However these stories would most likely not be interesting to 7th and 8th graders.  So now I need your help.  What are some good short stories-or better yet  short story collections you think are awesome?  Share in the comments!!

Reading different styles...that's kids stuff.