Part One describes, defines and illustrates the Socratic method in a sequence of lesson plans that explain how to engage students in the Socratic method of teaching and learning as a crucial prelude to reading and writing.  These lesson plans also enable teacher and student to develop the skills of independent, reflective, and critical thinking in one another.

Part Two defines reading.  Moeller says:  One of the best definitions of reading that I have found is illustrated by Ursula in her February 2010 HARPERS essay (“Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading”).  She contrasts reading with playing video games:

“Readers aren’t viewers; they recognize their pleasure as different from that of being entertained.  Once you’ve pressed the ON button, the TV goes on, and on, and on,         and all you have to do is sit and stare.  But reading is active, an act of attention, of   absorbed alertness--not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering.  In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your loving room; you have to listen to it in your head.  A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do.   It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put    your heart in it.  It won’t do the work for you.  To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it--everything short of writing it, in fact.  Reading is not        “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration-with the writer’s mind.  No wonder not everybody is up to it.”

Part Three focuses on the basic question of rhetoric: why do we write?  The primary assumption is that writing is a means to creating meaning.  Its consequence is the need to share that meaning with an audience.

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Victor J. Moeller has taught College Rhetoric, English Literature, American Literature, and World Literature in private and public high schools and colleges.  He was an in-service field instructor for the Great Books Foundation, Chicago, IL for 14 years.  During his years with the Chicago Foundation, he has conducted in-service Great Books Basic and Advanced Leader Training Course in 36 states.  He has Master degrees in English and Education.  Victor Moeller currently teaches at McHenry County College, Crystal Lake, Illinois, and and at Elgin Community College, Elgin, IL.  He may be reached at victormoeller.com or victormoeller@comcast.net

Since 2000, he has also been a reader of the Advanced Placement English Literature and Language Exam and consultant for the College Board.  He has written several books on the Socratic method of teaching and learning, a series of units for Advanced Placement Great Book Seminars and Film: Ten Themes (2007), College Rhetoric (2008),  Shakespeare Seminar and Film Series  1:  Macbeth and Lear, Much Ado About Nothing and Taming of the Shrew, and Henry V  (2009), College Reading and Writing (2011), and Shakespeare Seminar and Film Series  2:  Hamlet and Othello, Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It (2012).   

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