Two decades ago, during a brief stint working in a teacher preparation program, Heller got to know a young man who struck him as an exceptionally promising educator. Tom was a top student in the university's English department, a gifted writer, and, according to his supervising instructor at the local high school, far and away the best student teacher she had seen in her 40 years in the classroom. With our glowing recommendations in hand, he soon found a job teaching in a district not far from where he had grown up. Tom's first day of teaching went well enough, but that night he got a call from his principal, who berated him for assigning his students to read John Steinbeck's classic novel Of Mice and Men.