“A writer,” Saul Bellow once observed, “is a reader moved to emulation.” But what if it’s also the other way around? What if, when we think about writing, we are actually teaching ourselves how to ...

Allycia Uhrhan’s 6th graders at Truman Middle School in St. Louis started their field-science week collecting data on fish hatching at nearby Forest Park. But the trip really started the prior week, ...