Nick Chopper: The Tin Man (Creative Writing, Teaching and Learning)
By Don Allen (2026) Creative Writing, Teaching and Learning. One afternoon, I walked into my high school English class carrying a worn copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ( 1900 ), by L. Frank Baum . My students looked up at me like I had just pulled something ancient out of a trunk. I told them this wasn’t just a children’s story. It was personal. I first met this book in the 1970s, sitting in Mr. Boone’s sixth-grade classroom at Bancroft Elementary in Minneapolis. Back then, school had a rhythm to it. We read about tornadoes, silver shoes, and brick roads in the morning. By afternoon, we were in the gym, or home economics, or waiting our turn in woodshop. The day felt full. Stories felt like doorways. So when I opened Baum’s 1900 novel in front of seventy teenagers, I wasn’t just assigning reading. I was inviting them into something that once opened my own world. We read carefully. We asked questions. By the time we reached Chapter 5, the room shifted. That’s where the Ti...