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English teachers must be crazy. No, seriously. We must be; we have to be.

We actually wanted to enter classrooms full of students who hate English, as did their parents. We still wanted to be teachers after four to six more years of schooling, after grueling Teacher Education classes, after unpaid, thankless student-teaching experiences.

Of all the reading and writing situations and jobs, we chose to teach reading and writing! We're nuts. It's one thing to be a bookworm who loves to read all day and all night or a writer of stories and poems, but it's quite another phenomenon to impose our love of reading and writing on cell phone-toting, MP3-plugged, popularity-driven children.

As is the case in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, English teachers have to be crazy to teach English, but if we say we're crazy, then we're sane because we can't know we're crazy, but to teach English is crazy, and we do it anyway!

While Catch-22s cycles make for hilarious discussions and vicious cycles tend to ruin our days, what about the reading/writing/thinking cycle?

Just read what follows, and you'll understand an iota or so of what makes an English teacher:

To those of whom are still left behind (regardless of political interferences that suggest no one is-ha!), the reading/writing/thinking cycle is vicious, and mass education will have to make amazing leaps as a whole entity to keep the catch-22 from driving the unfortunate one through the cracks.

Reading difficulties have often shown that our nation's youth are lost in the societal influence of visual and auditory traps of music and television.

The same influences have crippled the abilities of our youth in terms of writing, as well. Listen to what you child's teacher is saying about the writing. Look at the state writing scores. While poor teaching strategies and rigid writing prompts make learning to read and write formidable tasks, parents and educators (and politicians) must look at the common link between reading and writing.

Thinking.

The answers haven't changed to the overly-asked, usually sarcastically-voiced, question: "What were you thinking?!"

I don't know. Nothing.

Not too many years ago, the children and students didn't know what they were thinking. Nothing was on a lot of minds when children did mindless things.

Nowadays, however, the "nothings" and "I don't knows" carry deeper problems. In addition to wrecked and homeless families, children have newer and more appealing distractions. Children whose families aren't shattered or

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