Strange Bedfellows: Surprising Text Pairs and Lessons for Reading and Writing Across Genres » (New Edition)

Carol Rawlings Miller is the author of the Heinemann title Strange Bedfellows. She has taught English for twenty-five years at the middle and secondary levels at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights, New York, as well as in Turkey, Ireland, and South Africa. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Time Warner Council for Basic Education. Carol earned a B.A. in English from Vassar College, and an M.A. in English from New York University. She has also studied at the New School and at the London Academy for Musical and Dramatic Arts in Shakespearean acting. She is the author of the best-selling 50 Writing Lessons That Work! as well as Irresistible Shakespeare.

Carol Rawlings Miller leads us and in turn our students into urgent conversations that have become all too scarce in many classrooms in recent years, places where the curriculum has become all too safe, too plain. When she pairs Martin Luther King and Shakespeare, there is a resounding cymbal crash in the head, as there is when Miller serves up speeches by Susan Sontag and George W. Bush. A stranger set of bedfellows has not been seen in some time....Miller has created a course of study that will bring back to the classroom something of the fire it once had but which recent movements have dampened. Jim Burke Author of The English Teacher's Companion, Third Edition

What do Arnold Schwarzengger and Barack Obama have in common? When it comes to helping students become savvy about genre, rhetoric, and language: everything. In Strange Bedfellows Carol Rawlings Miller pairs short pieces by famous writers and speakers for side-by-side discussion and frames these pairs in lessons that help students meet a variety of curricular goals.

With Strange Bedfellows your students will study the traits of effective writing and persuasion. They'll also sharpen their critical-reading skills through exposure to a variety of texts and authors:

Martin Luther King Jr. and William Shakespeare

Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger