The poster on the left was approximately 15 years old when I took this picture. I never laminated it when I first created it, so that just never happened. It’s got all sorts of rips in it, but I became sentimentally attached to it. Next to it is e.e. cummings’s poem, “l(a,” which I taught as part of a beginning-of-year unit on form and content, and the relationship between them.*

It usually was a week or more before I got to the unit. When we finally broke down the poem – which the students enjoyed because it was like puzzling out a riddle – I discovered that a few students had already figured it out, having looked closely at the poem every day; others had been looking but saw nothing more than some floating letters; and some had never noticed it at all.

And that’s the way it goes.

What are your students looking at right now?

* Thanks to @lrubins1629 for this remarkable series of lessons.