ABSTRACT
Bigelow’s question during that first meeting was, “What do you want students to learn from Red Badge of Courage?” It provided an illuminating moment in my teaching career. I fumbled about for an answer: “the brutality of war ….” But to be honest, I taught The Red Badge of Courage and the rest of the books because they were part of the literary canon, acknowledged classics taught or supplied by folks who I figured knew a lot more than I did. After all, I was just a teacher. They were the books I had read in high school, and they were the books I studied again as a literature major in college.
