Today, it’s easy to simply publish yourself on your own website. You might not go through the process of shopping your story around to literary magazines as writers did in the past (though you definitely can!). If you write and sell fiction, short stories are still valuable kinds of content. Tension Why Short Stories Are Worth Writing This post is part of the series: Short Story Suggestions for Teaching The Elements of LiteratureĪ good short story unit begins with good short stories.What are the four elements of a Short Story?ġ. A prereading discussion on wishing for something, getting it, and wishing you hadn’t makes for an engaging discussion, kind of like the time I begged my Mom to let me open a Christmas present the week before Christmas, her not letting me do it, opening the corner of it when she went to the grocery store, and finding it replaced with coal on Christmas morning. O’Henry’s “ The Ransom of Red Chief” - Anybody who’s ever babysat a brat can relate to Red Chief’s kidnappers.A man accuses another of cheating at poker and nobody believes him. Stephen Crane’s “ The Blue Hotel” - Don’t you hate it when you accuse someone of wrong doing, hire a private investigator, spread lies on the Internet, causing him or her to commit suicide? In “The Blue Hotel,” the roles are reversed.
It’s like the time you got a ‘B’ on your physics test after studying for hours and Donny Dumbbutt got an ‘A’ using a random number generator on the multiple choice and matching sections. Isaac Asimov’s “ The Machine that Won the War” - The ultimate in situational irony as Earth defeats a technologically advanced alien civilization by using the simplest machine ever created – a coin.Here’s a good “Story of an Hour” lesson plan. The Department of Homeland Security frowns on such activity, so I continued my life as before. After reading “Story of an Hour,” I started feeling paranoid and plotted to derail a train I was supposed to be on in order to test my wife. All this takes place in an hour (you may have figured that out from the title). Then her husband’s alive, which kills her. Kate Chopin’s “ Story of an Hour” - First her husband’s dead, which makes her sad but happy.It works a lot better than the time I got so enthralled with teaching irony in literature that I stayed up all night writing irony lesson plans, all of which had the same purpose: to convince students that everything in life is ironic (except for things in that song by Alanis Morissette, which is ironic).Īfter not sleeping for three days and accidentally stapling my hand to a bulletin board, I decided the best way to teach irony in literature is to use the following short stories. Of all the lesson plans I’ve tried, this one works best. Before reading these short stories for teaching irony in literature, you may want to review what irony is.