Mark Fabrizi

enior year. Second semester. En- glish class. For many students, this is the last place they want to be. But when you look around this classroom, you see students huddled together, poring over primary-source documents, looking for evidence to support their group's thesis. Oth- ers are listening to a Bob Dylan song, taking rapid notes every few minutes on the accompanying lyr- ics page. Still others are searching the Internet for corroborative information. The buzz of activity in this classroom would please any English teacher, but for this group of students, success in school does not come easily, and their struggles in En- glish over the years have distanced most of them from the subject, making their engagement that much more gratifying. Fortunately, their interest in sports is a powerful motivator, leading to our development of this Sports Stories class, a course that uses sports as its centerpiece to help inspire students as they strengthen their reading and writing skills.W...