I had not thought for a long time of the incident I mentioned in our morning discussion, in which an 11th-grade classmate of mine remarked that Thoreau would have supported the Vietnam war, obviously, because he was a great American writer and great Americans support their government. For me, that was a moment which nudged me into a slightly different and more critical line of thinking. (I remember now that in elementary school, his parents wouldn't allow him to go on a field trip where parents were driving, because he would have had to ride in a car driven by a ---WOMAN!) Not dramatic, but who knows when one of our students might experience a similar insight, and we might never even know.