In taking into account the realities of the writing process in the ways teachers organize their classrooms, they inescapably find themselves involved with the notion of student autonomy. Some guidelines for supporting independent-minded adolescents in the classroom suggest themselves, and this article provides other suggestions for planning creative and exhilarating experiences for this particularly independent group of students. The author calls for a change from the traditional pedagogy to become not only one of style but also of structure, whereby students actually become the autonomous agents working by choice. Medway notes that it then seems particularly important for teachers of these particular students to avoid characteristics so readily associated by students with school such as that of a mean-spirited, life-denying institution: the nagging, the checking up, the walking around with lists, the continuous poison gas cloud of petty interdictions, criticisms, and controls. Medway further challenges teachers to find other motivation for work because the appeal to a work ethic alone quite often is seen as a control ploy. Medway closes by saying that for the group of students described in this article, work needs to be presented as a source of satisfaction, and a means of fulfilling direct purposes. In order to succeed with this group of students, teachers may need to learn that "doing nothing" may be less destructive of a personal sense of purpose than "work" done merely for the sake of appearances.