The general concept behind Michael Berube’s “Teaching to the Six” is both an interesting and vexing one, and one that I’ve considered often. Though I’ve never taught a literature class, the parallel to student engagement is transferrable to the majority of college courses. In every composition course I’ve taught, a week or two into the semester, I begin to realize that my students are varied in skill and interest-level, sometimes dramatically so. When I taught at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, for example, one of my first year composition courses included a male student who wrote almost better than me (ALMOST), and a couple students who wrote at what I estimated to be a middle-school level. In the center of the spectrum were students who wrote appropriately-enough for the class, others who wrote slightly better, and still others who wrote in a not-quite-middle-school-but-not-college-appropriate manner. I would often lament to my adjunct-faculty colleagues that I felt at all times that somebody was getting stiffed in class, whether it was the future literature scholar or the dazed/confused/overwhelmed students. How could I reach everyone? How could I best ensure that all my students were meeting the learning outcomes for that class, not just the metaphorical “six”?