Worthingway Middle School English teacher Jen Baker admits she’s “hooked” on the young adult series by Stephenie Meyer, populated by young and earnest vampires. Baker is using the series and other popular young adult books to hook students on reading and to teach classic themes in literature.
“Using young adult lit gives students a window into other literature,” she said.
Baker compares Twilight to the classic Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.
“The text of Wuthering Heights is extremely dense and even I struggled to get through it in college,” she said. “But once students see that Jacob in Twilight is Heathcliff and Bella is Catherine, and Edward is a combination of Edgar and Heathcliff, suddenly the story makes more sense because they can apply what they already know about the Bella-Jacob-Edward triangle to Catherine, Heathcliff and Edgar.”
“The fact that Stephenie Meyer was a lit major in college and consciously shaped her books around classic literature strengthened the idea because identifying universal themes would help kids understand the more difficult classic works,” she said.

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