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"In my classroom, I make every effort to show students clearly how passionate I am about the texts and ideas I'm teaching—how much a poem, a novel, or a literary movement can mean to me and many others. They appreciate this, I think, in part because it gives them permission to feel passionate about their own relationships to texts, in turn. When that sense of the power of literature is circulating in the room, it makes it much easier for me to make palpable for them the historical and cultural significance of the works, on one hand, or to convince them of the importance of a line break or an element of plot, on the other. What I appreciate most is that this becomes a feedback loop, wherein my own experience of texts that have become too familiar from frequent teaching is reenergized by the enthusiasms (or engaged resistance) my students express."
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