In English class this past week, my teacher handed each student a copy of The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss as we walked in. Some students reacted the same to it as if it were a copy of a George Orwell novel, and some students had a good laugh at it. None of us understood the reason for the books until my teacher wrote the word psychoanalysis on the board.

Every writer, young or old, has experienced it at least once in their writing career. You put your pen on the paper to write words, but words don’t flow onto the paper like they usually do. You are stuck in the writer’s block.

As I was applying to colleges this fall, I was one of the few kids that knew his or her major before starting their first year. Or at least I thought I did.

In this post our intern, Ben Kostyack, raises questions about the value of the literary canon. Read his take then weigh in with your own. In high school English, everyone reads the classics. To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and various Shakespeare plays. After we recently stumbled through Macbeth in my 12th grade AP English Literature class, my classmates and I questioned the reasoning behind why we need to read these outdated books.