Whole books in school: Today's curriculum makes reading seem so boring.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

We are English professors who stumbled into a debate about high school pedagogy. We wrote a book to help college instructors teach close reading, the fundamental skill of literary studies. And then, well before it was published, we started hearing from education scholars training high school teachers, and high school teachers themselves, who had caught wind of the book through advance essays and word of mouth. They were interested in how we describe close reading, the tools we provide for teaching it, and the claim we make for its importance. They pulled us into their own conversations: the debate over testing, skills, content, and, burbling up into mainstrea