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This essay explores teaching Piers Plowman in a resolutely secular context: the University of Colorado Boulder, where students tend to see the poem as Christian and, therefore, unfamiliar and/ or irrelevant. The author first discusses her efforts to teach the poem via historicism and literary analysis, the two modes fundamental to her own training, and the ways in which these modes ultimately proved unsatisfying. Then, the author advocates for teaching the poem in terms of moral interests, as an evaluation of human behavior, thoughts, and feelings. She includes a couple of exercises that help students see the poem as an attempt to make sense of the self and its relation to the social world.