My children, here in Connecticut, have also read the above in school (maybe there is a national conspiracy) and have also done the Canterbury Tales and the Athurian legend. Chaucer caused some negative reaction, but I'd hesitate to call it obstinacy. MT, on the other hand, got rave reviews at our house. I had told them how much they'd enjoy it and even that didn't cause them to reject it out of hand. Professor Sponberg makes the excellent suggestion that the text be read aloud for a bit. I agree, especially if you can do justice to the accents. I was first attracted to Dickens by movies and the wonderful language of the London street people as portrayed by the actors. It is difficult to imagine young people (especially boys--ok, so I'm sexist) unable to relate to Huck and Jim. True, I grew up on the Mississippi, or next to it, anyway, but even my Yankee children understand these two perennial favorites (maybe because they grew up in the shadow of MT's Hartford home (which now looks super in its holiday trim, btw) but that's a bit of a stretch). If students cannot know and love/admire/hate Twain's people, how will they ever cope with Henry James' or Shakespeare's? In closing, a remark on the recent "n"-word discussion. I read Huck for the first time when I was 12 or 13 years old, a child of the deep south which was just then (mid-50's) becoming the "New South." We were taught *never* to say the "n"-word, and I don't believe that I ever have actually said it. Still, we knew that others had used it, did use it and would probably (unhappily) continue to use it. One doesn't have to be an honor student to appreciate historical and literary context, however. Surely, students are not shocked/offended by that (or any) word now more than they were 35 years ago. Are they? Tom Flaherty Central Conn. State University