Our starting point is provided by two accounts of observed lessons. The two lessons happened, at more or less the same time, in the same English department in an East London secondary school. Both lessons, observed by the second- and third-named authors, involved the shared reading of the same novel. We are interested in the difference between these two lessons, a difference that is manifested most clearly in the different ways in which questions enter in the two lessons. We argue that this difference is symptomatic of two fundamentally different versions of English as a school subject.