This article questions educators' reliance on textbooks through the author's own struggles to come to terms with his ambiguous, sometimes frustrating, relationship with textbooks. Seeing the wide-open white pages on his syllabus and schedule, not filled or structured by a textbook, the author realizes he has an opportunity to reconsider his pedagogical landscape. Quickly he recognizes how many ideas he has meant to implement over the years, but never fully implemented because he had to cover the textbook: sharing with students his favorite writing examples, having students write during class, using student writing to illustrate rhetorical principles, and inviting students to find and evaluate materials for use in the course. The author argues that textbooks are merely tools that he has sometimes given too much power. As Robert J. Connors argues in "Textbooks and the Evolution of the Discipline," educators must keep "training teachers to stand by themselves . . . re-invent[ing] textbooks in the image of their best nature--as their tools, not crutches they depend upon for all support. Connors's article starts with a 1933 quote from Porter Perrin, an early writing researcher, who proclaims, "The way out does not lie in tools but in sheer teaching." The author contends that teachers are often trying to find a way out: a way out from student lack of engagement, a way out from students who do not read, a way out from their own boredom in explaining a concept they have covered hundreds of times, a way out from the ever complicated interrelationship between student and teacher.