I’d been so intent on having the kids see things my way, so fixated on making sure that the interpretations I had absorbed as a student would be the ones that they took away, too, that I’d seen their resistances, their failures to notice what I wanted them to notice, as a problem, rather than as a solution—as a way to see something I’d never noticed myself. They’d tried to tell me all this, that day when they were so eagerly explaining their ideas about the Apologoi, about how maybe Homer was saying that Odysseus had made his whole story up; but I’d barely listened.
