LEARN MORE

This page explains why we created Nifty Lit Club and how our courses work, in four parts:

➜ PART ONE: The Great Decline. Many young people today cannot read classic novels. Why does it matter? And how can Nifty help?

➜ PART TWO: Our method. How do our courses actually work? How can taking a course with us increase your student's reading capacity?

➜ PART THREE: Reading like a writer. Why do our courses combine literature study with creative writing?

➜ PART FOUR: Community and shared purpose. How do we create online community for our students that is genuinely fun, vibrant and meaningful?

➜ PART ONE: The Great Decline.

Talk to anyone who teaches high school seniors or first year university students and you'll hear the same thing: young people today struggle with reading books that used to be standard curricular fare. It's part of a much larger, well documented decline in literacy. As career educators, we've both watched this decline play out - up close and in real time. We've spent a great deal of time thinking about the causes and consequences:

𓏴 Many high school students today, including high-achieving kids at high-ranked schools, are genuinely not able to read complex, full-length, non-contemporary novels; this means that in college, students across the humanities and social sciences struggle to complete assigned reading, as they have not developed the necessary attention span or the metacognitive and comprehension skills. 

𓏴 Likewise, many teens write extensively in chats and on social media apps, but lack structured creative writing experience. This means students are coming into college without basic skills in crafting syntax, identifying and mimicking genre conventions, or understanding the writing process as a creative, iterative, generative process that is inherently useful for thinking through ideas. Without those foundational skills, college students find producing academic essays that meet basic guidelines extremely challenging.

Higher-level literacy isn't just about academic success. A person who cannot enjoy reading old books is a person cut off from the great conversations of the ages, hearing only bits and pieces second-hand, and inevitably quite dependent on online content. Gaining the skills to read widely and with curiosity, across genres and centuries, gives our young people lifetime access to immense riches.

Nifty Lit Club courses build those skills.

➜ PART TWO: Our method.

Our courses are carefully designed to increase student reading capacity: month by month, year by year. How? We build a scaffold.

Look at the bottom of the stack. Simple but well-written childhood chapter books are the foundation for longer, richer stories; historical fiction builds up the background knowledge that is crucial to reading adventurously. Fun sci-fi, fantasy and mystery books from various decades introduce young readers to the tenor and tone of adult fiction and to the conventions of various genres. Humor books, epic quests, thrillers from diverse authors and time periods, fiction from the near past - each plays a role in broadening the young reader's horizons and continues to build up general knowledge and attention span.

All of that forms a scaffold that allows teens to successfully read college-level literature. Our courses carefully sequence books to steadily grow higher-level reading skills in our students. The course structure, fun exercises, and community helps reluctant readers through texts they would otherwise give up on; each successful reading experience builds up confidence and skills for the next.

➜ PART THREE: Reading like a writer.

The creative writing workshop component of our courses is key: It deepens and accelerates that growth dramatically, because our writing exercises get students 'reading like writers' - studying the text to figure out how to recreate various aspects of the author's magic in their own work.

Young writers start noticing word choice, rhythm, pacing; as they work hard on their own stories, their appreciation for great authors increases while the writing process itself is demystified. This metacognitive leap - thinking about the writer's thinking - transforms how students read and how they feel about reading. It's a bit like learning basic tile work to put in a backsplash in your kitchen. It makes you see tiles - out and about in the world - a little differently: you're newly aware of the choices someone made in layout and grout, and you can see little mistakes - or impressive excellence - in a way you really can't until you've tried it with your own hands. You see tiles as a creative person who can work with them to make something worthwhile. Just so, working at creative writing makes our students see (even very challenging!) literature as something created by a fellow writer.

➜ PART FOUR: Community and shared purpose.

In all our courses, student learning takes place in a dynamic writer's community, where students read each other's work and collaborate on fun challenges. Wordplay, jokes based on shared references to the course texts, the tenor and tone of course materials, and regular structured social engagements makes students feel like they're part of a tight-knit writer's group within a vibrant youthful literary milieu. The joy of being part of a sustained creative community is a key part of our curriculum and part of what makes our courses so unique.

We have decades of experience working with groups of kids and teens, and we know how to create a genuine community in an online course. Check out our testimonials from our Pilot Program to hear parents and student experiences HERE.