"A year or so before I began facing a classroom on a daily basis, I had the idea that teaching English would be a series of extended Socratic dialogues between me and mv students. . . . I would lead forth my eager, responsive . . . idealistic students from the cave of adolescent mental wistfulness into the clear light of Truth upon the verdant and lush fields of literature."
So wrote Gary Cornog in Don't Smile Until Christmas (1970). Needless to say, he was mistaken.
Teachers have...