This site is a complete reading of Chapter 5, an excerpt from the book The Acid Test for Literature Teaching. It describes in detail the concerns involved with teaching literature to adolescents and young readers in today's classrooms, and suggests that as teachers, we can develop criteria for judging the short-term motivation we provide our students, the works we ask them to read, and the teaching methods we employ. Providing a thoughtful and compelling look at how we used to teach, need to teach, and currently teach literature, this link explores how students' personal responses to literature can be valid and important to their understanding of texts. (author/bcbrown)