We all want children to become engaged and enthusiastic readers. Yet teachers are often challenged by students who, because of histories with a standardized and irrelevant curriculum, poor pedagogy, or unique learning styles, have become alienated from the written word. Impatient with teachers' ignorance and desiring to be liberated from well-meaning interventions, these so called "struggling" readers often make short shrift of teachers' best efforts. 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 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 in the following essays: (1) Near & Far; (2) Dirt & Early Reading; and (3) The Pedagogical Use of Loss. This collection of essays reminds the reader that which would be forgotten: Reading and writing are profoundly human activities requiring mindful attunement to the interpersonal relationships through which they are achieved. Individual essays contain references.