Current policy in England, informed by a version of cognitive science, enforces an absolute distinction between experts and novices, or teachers and learners; from this binary, operating in tandem with regimes of performativity instantiated in a curriculum shaped by high-stakes testing, are derived particular forms of pedagogy and particular pedagogic relations. And yet what happens in classrooms is seldom reducible to the prescriptive dictates of policy. Even in tightly constrained contexts, teachers and students act in ways that open up other possibilities, other ways of responding to each other and to the texts that are read together. An account of a single observed lesson, taught by a pre-service teacher, explores some of these tensions and suggests the need for different ways of understanding what is accomplished within English as a school subject. ["Experts v. Novices: 'A Fool Takes in All the Lumber of Every Sort'" was written with Sanaa Noor.]