Integrating writing instruction into the content-area classroom poses a variety of challenges for instructors at all levels. Beyond the need to embrace a new skill set involving writing instruction, there is the resistance of students (and faculty) who find a disconnection between content-area and literacy learning. Developing a method for engaging reticent (sometimes even antagonistic) students in discipline-specific writing is simpler than one might imagine if we privilege less the literacy product and more the literacy learner--if we, in short, begin from the student's perspective. In teaching writing, I do just that with what I reductively call the "Stick Student." I think of the Stick Student as writing's answer to the Mobius Strip, a tool deceptive in its elegant simplicity.