Faculty members take pride in the great diversity of students attending LaGuardia Community College. Their students self-identify with various nationalities, races, religions, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. Not only do students adopt diverse identity markers, but they also come to their classroom with variant skill levels. It is difficult to make generalizations about the students given the great diversity they encounter in their classrooms. Still, when designing a course, the author must make general assumptions about the best texts to teach and the best methods for teaching these. A choice of a given text not only implies that it has something of value to teach the students, it also assumes that at least a majority of them will engage that text in order to learn as much as possible from it. In other words, when they choose a text they make assumptions about their students as well as the text. In this essay, the author argues for raising class consciousness among community college students and discusses why and how he encourages Writing through Literature (ENG 102) students to reflect on issues of class and work through an analysis of the works of Charles Bukowski.