Teaching classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird in 2016

Is classic literature still relevant in the contemporary age? It certainly is if you're talking about works of social criticism around race and the American consciousness like To Kill a Mockingbird. One of my colleagues, Alisa Wills-Keely of Smoky Hill High School, was recently profiled in the Denver Post for her work with the novel in the era of Election-2016. The class and the article focuses on how the Classic Novel helps students develop perspective, empathy. 

A novel, set in a sleepy southern town in the 1930s and written by a young white woman in the late 1950s, is remarkably relevant to students at Smoky Hill High School in 2016. The themes explored in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” – racial and social stereotypes, discrimination, inequity and injustice – seem just as common in the world today as they were when Scout Finch was growing up in the fictional town of Maycomb nearly 90 years ago