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When I was teaching at a high school in Alaska, we read Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground" together. Paragraph by paragraph. We spent six weeks on that one story. Here's what paragraph-by-paragraph close reading actually looks like: I'd read a passage aloud. Then I'd ask, "What is the Underground Man really saying here?" Silence at first. Then someone would venture an interpretation. Someone else would push back. Within ten minutes, they'd be arguing about human nature, about pride and spite and self-deception. People hear this and assume I was working with exceptional kids. I wasn't. I was working with kids who had never been asked to grapple with genuinely profound ideas before. In my experience, when you treat young people as capable of serious intellectual work, and take the time to train them how to read difficult texts, they learn how to do so.