Yale's Cooke Teaching Program is designed to diminish the sense of imperviousness and immobility that the university often conveys to its surrounding community. During the academic year, one Yale graduate student attended a high school senior honors English class twice weekly. It was an advanced class (mostly minorities), many were college-bound, and there was a range of talent and motivation in the class. The graduate student functioned as a team teacher, participating in regularly scheduled classes. Her presence created a more open and dialogic atmosphere of learning, helping the students to become more confrontational--and to challenge the texts and the idea of authoritative readings. Her most rewarding moments occurred in reading poetry with her students. Although the mere word "poetry" produced instant resistance, the idea of privileged access that poetry suggests became an advantage with the students. Close reading and discovering formal "keys" to the poetry set up reading as a puzzle that requires engagement and effort, not merely the passive reception of inflexible literary meaning. Having the students write their own poems (sonnets) reinforced their familiarity with the technical aspects of poetry and further encouraged them to consider the reader's agency in creating poetic meaning. When the grad student elected to help one student who had been expelled and then readmitted, she found that he fit easily into the atmosphere of Yale's Sterling Library--falling asleep over his books like the undergraduates. Evaluations from her students were positive about the "Yale teacher," especially in the socio-cultural sense. (NKA)