It’s important to prepare your students for benchmark and end-of-year assessments. Deepening their knowledge of literature and the history/culture that produced these literary texts is also necessary. Therefore, you should inform your students’ understanding of literature and history by preparing them for standardized tests. Or wait, maybe it's the other way around: you should prepare your students for standardized tests by helping them deepen their understanding of literature and history. Will that work? Are the two tasks mutually exclusive? Does focusing on one negate the other? Is it possible to do both simultaneously?

Catch-22 is replete with what appear to be logic games that deal with incredibly complex issues, such as war, obedience, rules and order, bureaucracy, loyalty, and patriotism. On the one hand, these logic puzzles have the potential to torment the reader. At the same time, however, the novel’s examples provide great opportunities for students to unpack and understand concepts like “doublespeak,” de jure versus de facto laws and regulations, or at least contemporary media speak (which is just as useful!).