Malcolm Gladwell once wrote that one attribute of good writing is that it lets you see the world through someone else's eyes. It lets you walk a mile in their circumstance and start to understand things as they understand them.

This is the power of story. You can say things without saying them.

In all this, there lies an opportunity for those who are teaching English classes. That's the lesson we can learn from books we're forced to read in high school: empathy.

Much harder to teach, and much harder to evaluate with a standardized test, but I think it's far more important than focusing on themes, foreshadowing, and onomatopoeia.