In this provocative and moving essay, Clio Stearns, a Bank Street educated teacher, toggles back and forth between moments with her young daughter who daily grows more attached to books and moments with her fifth grade students who remain disconnected from her carefully chosen texts. Refracted through a psychoanalytic lens and a deeply caring heart, Stearns’ description of her classroom practices offers a canny account of all that she must give up in order to see through and past her students’ resistance. In a surprising turn of events she learns to join with her students as they become curious readers of the world that really matters to them.

Three senior scholars—Madeleine Grumet, Timothy Lensmire, and Alice Pitt—respond to Stearns’ essay by reflecting on their lives as curriculum theorists in order to highlight the fundamental dynamics of teaching and learning with other people’s children. Together with Stearns they remind us about what the purveyors of tests and measures would have us forget: reading and writing are profoundly human activities requiring mindful attunement to the interpersonal relationships through which they are achieved.