About

About Teen Literacy Tips
Teen Literacy Tips is an educational resource for those who teach literature to adolescents. If you’re a classroom teacher, a homeschooling parent, or a student teacher, Teen Literacy Tips is designed for you. Major areas include:

• Resources: A roundup of popular articles and multimedia downloads
• Recommended Books: Essential books for the literature teacher, including books about teaching adolescents. If you have a suggestion for a book that’s not listed, use the contact page below to tell me about it.

About Nick
Nick has been teaching middle school students since 1990, and in 2001 he was named Distinguished Teacher of the Year by the National Catholic Education Association. He is a husband, father of four, Catholic school teacher and vice principal, and author of ROMAN Reading: 5 Practical Skills for Transforming Your Life through Literature. In 2012 he was ordained a Roman Catholic Deacon.

He is currently principal at St. John Vianney Catholic School in Spokane, Washington.

His favorite books are Don Quixote, The Lord of the Rings, and the Master and Commander series by Patrick O’Brian.

Nick’s philosophy of reading is based in part on the following principles:

• The only way to improve as a reader is to read.
• Reading for entertainment and reading for enlightenment are not mutually exclusive.
• Reading is “when, with nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more.” Mortimer J. Adler
• “The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity.” Thomas Carlyle
• “Some books are meant to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Francis Bacon
• “Everything we read stimulates our mind to think, and what we think determines what we desire and desires are the seedbed of our actions. Given this iron law of human nature–from reading to thinking, to desiring, to acting–we are shaping our destiny by the books we choose to have enter our minds through print.” Fr. John Hardon, S.J.
• “He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.” Roland Barthes
• “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” Henry David Thoreau
• “It’s not how many books you get through, it’s how many books get through you.” Mortimer J. Adler