I joined a book club this year. I’m a female English teacher in her thirties living in the Midwest, so you’re probably not surprised—I seem like someone who is probably in three book clubs. But actually, it’s my first time! As I write this in February, I haven’t attended my first meeting yet, but we’re gearing up to discuss Niall Williams’s This is Happiness at the end of the month. As I read, I’ve been excitedly scribbling thoughts on the index card I’m using as a bookmark—things I notice about the prose, questions I have about the characters—and just the other day, it hit me: this is what I’m training my students for.

Many of my high schoolers don’t love to read. Some do, of course, but for the majority of them, being assigned a few chapters of a novel each night is a hoop to jump through rather than something to look forward to. Because of that, I have occasional moments of doubt that the skills I’m teaching will ever be of use to them in “the real world.” But then I’m reading Niall Williams on a Saturday morning with a cup of coffee thinking of questions I can ask my new book club, and I remember that humans just love stories. Whether or not I can convince my students to enjoy reading, someone someday will ask them about a story they love. Maybe that story is a movie or a TV show or a YouTube channel or a recipe blog. But chattering on about that story will help them build a connection with a coworker or a friend or a partner. And that’s a “real world” skill.

In this, our annual resource review issue, we’ve got a lot of stories. Abby DeGroot’s students at Dordt have suggestions of memoirs to teach in your middle or high school classrooms. Mary Jo Staal and Bill Boerman-Cornell have a plethora of genres and titles for your middle grades and elementary school kids, too. Judith Anderson thinks Holden’s story in The Catcher in the Rye can still resonate with students despite being frequently ignored in Christian classrooms. And Hannah Main-van der Kamp recommends a book that can help you teach the story of poetry.

From there, we continue the issue with two articles focused on our readers themselves. Eric Wildermuth reviews Alex Quigley’s Why Learning Fails (And What to Do About It) and Toby Coffman has some faith-centered thoughts to add to Jonathan Haidt’s much-discussed The Anxious Generation. Lastly, Lisa Devall-Martin and Matthew Schonewille address the technology tool of the decade and offer a framework to help our Christian schools decide how to use AI ethically.

Maybe you’ll gather a club of coworkers, pick a book from this issue, and spend some of your summer with a great story. (And if reading’s not your thing, maybe writing is? Consider contributing to CEJ next year—our issue theme announcement is at the end of this issue.)

~Abby Zwart, Editor