I hope that my teaching helps students to recognize that a seeming difficulty is not to be feared but embraced and that the easiest route is not always the most satisfying one. The challenges of reading a literary text, writing about it, and discussing it can seem daunting but the rewards are infinite: in learning to read well and to read deeply we can learn how to think with increasing intellectual astuteness and with greater pleasure. We can banish boredom from our lives and learn to appreciate the nuanced, layered, complex web of potential meanings and associations that good literature provides. I try to situate literature in time and place, so some facts enter my classroom, but all in all I prefer that my students be comfortable in the playing fields of ambiguity. At the same time I hope that students learn how to recognize and to create crisp clear writing that will serve them well in any profession.