There are moments in teaching that never show up on a lesson plan.
A student’s hand goes up—not to answer your question, but to ask one you hadn’t considered. Suddenly, thirty adolescents stop thinking about the quiz next Friday and start arguing about justice, friendship, race, grief, or why people make the choices they do.
The room gets louder. Hands keep going up. Someone changes their mind. Someone else refuses to. You glance down at your carefully planned lesson for the day, quietly slide it to the side, and think, Well… I guess we’re doing this instead.
Those were always my favorite days. Not because we abandoned the lesson, but because we finally found it. That’s when I realized the best learning rarely comes from faithfully following a curriculum guide.
It comes from following curiosity.
Education has become remarkably good at measuring whether we’ve covered material.
I’m not always convinced we’ve uncovered understanding.
Some of the most meaningful lessons I ever taught emerged from a conversation, a disagreement, a question no one expected, or a chapter in a novel that refused to let students turn the page without first talking about it.
I never believed much in canned curriculum.
That probably sounds strange coming from someone who spent years in a classroom surrounded by curriculum guides, pacing calendars, benchmark schedules, and enough binders to stop a small-caliber round.
Every year, someone would hand us the latest “teacher-proof” program that promised to solve literacy if we would just follow it with enough fidelity.
I’ve never met a kid who learned to love reading because Page 147 said Tuesday was “Theme Day.”
Don’t get me wrong. Canned curriculum has its place. Anthologies are useful. They are great for introducing genres, exposing students to different authors, and giving teachers a common starting point.
That was my play too. I’d use the anthology to launch us into a genre, sprinkle in informational articles to work on expository reading and writing, and make sure students wrestled with nonfiction because life eventually hands everyone an instruction manual, a contract, or a news article whether they’re ready for it or not.
But the heartbeat of my classroom wasn’t the anthology. It was the novels.
I had three novels I kept coming back to. Not because they were easy, but because they refused to stay inside the covers.
Maniac Magee.
A book about homelessness… until it wasn’t. It became a conversation about grief, race, identity, community, belonging, loss, forgiveness, and the strange places people find family.
Stargirl.
A book about a quirky girl… until it wasn’t. Suddenly we were talking about individuality, curiosity, relationships, friendship, conformity, first love, and the enormous pressure teenagers feel to become exactly like everyone else.
The Outsiders.
Most students expected gangs and rumbling teenagers. Instead, we found ourselves discussing identity, privilege, communication, social class, assumptions, perception, relationships, mindset, and why people are often fighting battles nobody else can see.
Every year, the conversations changed.
The books stayed the same; the students didn’t.
That’s the beauty of a good novel.
A novel doesn’t just teach reading – It teaches people.
The same chapter that makes one student laugh might make another cry. One student sees injustice. Another recognizes themselves for the first time. A third suddenly understands someone they used to judge.
No worksheet can compete with that.
And here’s the funny part; teachers spend an awful lot of time trying to come up with discussion questions. The best novels usually beat us to it.
Half the time I’d walk into class with my carefully planned lesson, only to have a student ask a question in the first five minutes that sent us somewhere completely different—and somewhere far more meaningful.
Those were the days you quietly folded up the lesson plan, set it aside, and pretended that was exactly what you intended all along.
Experience teaches you that sometimes the best teaching is simply getting out of the way.
Ultimately, that was always my goal. Not to finish a novel. Not to finish a unit. But to help students build a catalog of experiences through reading.
Read something.
Talk about it.
Write about it.
Listen to someone who saw it differently.
Revise what you think.
Repeat.
Communication wasn’t the product of learning – It was the learning.
That philosophy became the foundation of my graduate work during my master’s program. I wanted to question the status quo in our classrooms—to leave the safety of the box and explore what education could look like when students were invited into real conversations.
Conversations with intention; with purpose. With the courage to venture into places where there weren’t always tidy answers. That kind of teaching requires vulnerability. It means admitting you don’t have every answer.
It means giving students a real voice—not the illusion of one where they’re rewarded for memorizing facts and regurgitating predetermined responses, but an authentic voice that questions, challenges, wonders, and contributes.
It means trusting that learning isn’t measured by how closely students echo the teacher, but by how confidently they begin to think for themselves.
I rebuilt my teaching philosophy around that belief, and eventually it became the lens through which I led as a school administrator.
My role changed, but the mission didn’t.
I wanted classrooms where curiosity mattered more than compliance, where discussion carried as much weight as the correct answer, and where reading wasn’t simply about finishing a book—it was about discovering ourselves and understanding each other a little better.
That same philosophy was going to become the heartbeat of my doctoral research as well. Then, as tends to happen with carefully crafted plans, the world had other ideas. A global pandemic arrived, classrooms changed overnight, and the questions educators were asking suddenly became very different from the ones I’d been preparing to answer.
But that’s a story for another time.
What stayed with me through all of it was something I believed long before I ever hung a diploma on the wall.
The right book doesn’t simply teach a lesson, it starts a conversation. And the funny thing about a great conversation is that it never really ends.
Long after the final page is turned, its questions linger. They follow us into relationships, difficult decisions, and moments we never expected. We revisit characters as though they were old friends, and arguments as though they were our own.
Looking back, I don’t remember measuring success by how many chapters we finished or how many standards we checked off. I remember the days when a room full of students forgot to look at the clock. Because for a little while, they weren’t reading a book, they were reading each other.
And that’s a lesson no curriculum has ever been able to package.
There’s more waiting at https://xinkblotz.com.
Telling stories, sharing thoughts, and drinking coffee. A blend of fiction, reflection, and whatever’s brewing—one post at a time.
Stories have always traveled best by word of mouth. If one of these finds a place in your heart, I’d be honored if you’d drop a like or share it with someone else.
© 2026 Mariano Velez ~ InkBlotz Press
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