Composition in the schools has long been under a curse, and not without reason. It has lacked substance, vitality, enrichment. The stream has been so shallow that, in Ben Jonson's words, one could probe it with one's middle finger. There has been in composition teaching too much correcting of morbid English, too much metaphor mongering, too much vaporing about style, to permit it to rise to the dignity of a first-rate discipline. But now composition seems to be coming into its rights. The old superstition which made the composition teacher the Pariah of the public school system is surely passing. The time is at hand when the opportunities for scholarship and general culture in this branch of instruction will be generally recognized.

IN THE FALL OF I 97 5 the 94th Congress passed Public Law 94-142, which maintained the equality of rights of children in the pursuit of education and made mainstreaming the rule rather than the exception. Although much has been said about the disparate burden this mandate places on the classroom teacher, the intent is humane and just: all persons have a rightful place in society, and society must accommodate certain individual differences. One handicapped group that has already begun to assert its rights and claim its space in the larger society is the community of the hearing impaired. Because of the nature of this particular handicap, it almost seems that PL 94-142 was written especially for them. The only handicapping feature of hearing impairment is the restriction or loss of the ability to communicate with the larger, hearing population. Consequently, this handicap is bilateral: the larger society is also by its inability to communicate except through written or oral language. Therefore, mainstreaming the hearing impaired at a very early age, in spite of the difficulty teachers will have writing individual learning programs, will bring both of these groups to a point of mutual understanding and acceptance, enlarging and enriching the mainstream these students join. The future is bright and hopeful. However, what do we do with the young adults who have finished their public schooling and now, facing forty to fifty years of participation in the adult world, need additional training and skills? The post-secondary schools already in existence that provide programs or services for the hearing impaired are few and widely scattered. And the only liberal arts college for the deaf, Gaulladet, couldn't possibly bring this kind of education within reach of the multitude of qualified persons within this group. This relative dearth of post-secondary opportunities for the deaf, coupled with the increased emphasis on education of the in general, is going to have a definite impact on many colleges that may have never even heard of Public Law 94-142. As more and more hearing impaired individuals who are now in high schools recognize their equality of rights in the pursuit of education, their goals will rise. And being unwilling to travel to Minnesota, Louisianna, or D.C., they will begin to knock at the doors of their own state insstitutions. Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act (PL 93-112) prohibits these institutions from using a person's handicap as a determining factor in admissions, and there seems to be evidence that the institutions will have the responsibility of accommodating the handicap to whatever extent possible. However, many of these institu-

ALL I COULD SEE in front of me was white. White walls, frozen white on the roof outside my window, icicles hanging from a nearby roof gutter like translucent chandeliers. Rows of houses filled with blank minds; people staring at blank paper trying to fill the pages with anything. To generate thoughts and transfer them to paper, an impossible task. But why? Do writing demons cloud the mind and make writing so painful? The final paper was due in a few weeks. It was to be our perfect paper. A month after handing it in we would be teaching composition to some poor kids. I had no energy to write it and nothing to write about. I disgustedly left the typewriter and sprawled out on the bed. The page was blank so I couldn't even crumple it to vent my frustration. I picked up a book of short stories by Woody Alien and begin reading about a Boston College coed who hired a detective to find out if God was dead. She needed the information for a term paper. This story gave me an idea for my own final paper. There have been many articles on why Johnny can't read or write. Why such a tremendous interest in this fellow Johnny? Just who is he? I was determined to find out and use the material in my final paper. I went back to my typewriter and began writing letters to some of the major publications in which Johnny's story had appeared. After a week of receiving no replies, I began calling the places on the phone. Everyone I spoke with laughed at me. I called the FBI but the most I could get from them was, No comment. At this point I began to suspect conspiracy. There was no logical reason unless the government was now getting into conspiracy as an art form. Conspiracy for conspiracy's sake. One kid could not have any noticeable effect on the national average for standardized tests. My investigation had reached a dead end until one day I looked at a book titled Current Topics in Language (Nancy Ainsworth Johnson, ed.: Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1976) and came upon an article entitled Juanito's Reading Problems: Foreign Language Interference and Reading Skill Acquisition, by Nancy Modiano. So the plot thickened; either Johnny was using an alias, or matters had been complicated by a new person (or should I say persona) entering the scene. Going on the assumption that Johnny and Juanito were one and the same, I hired a detective to find him. All we had to go on was his name and the fact that he supposedly couldn't read or write. The detective tramped around the Midwest through the snow, made numerous phone calls, and followed around certain literary editors. After two weeks the situation seemed hopeless and I could no longer afford her fees, that is, if I was to pay the next semester's tuition. It was at the back of

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TEACHING MILTON'S POETRY raises difficult problems. More than the work of most literary figures, Milton's poetry demands a familiarity with its literary, cultural, and historical milieu. A knowledge of classical mythology, Christian theology, Puritan controversy, and seventeenth-century history is often central to an understanding of Milton's work, and, as every teacher of Milton knows, today's students rarely come to a Milton course with such background. Another teaching problem results from Milton's reputation. Not only do most students consider Milton a difficult and a remote poet, but they also think of him as a Puritan. For them, all too often to be a Puritan is to be a religious fanatic, a kill-joy, or, worst of all, a sexual prude. More serious than either of these problems is that of aesthetic taste. Milton is a master of the long poem; we live in an era that values short poetic forms and fiction. Milton is a lover of ornamentation; we live in an era that favors directness in style. Milton is a writer of grandiloquent poetry (my students pejoratively refer to it as flowery); we live in an era that prefers simplicity and understatement. Milton is a skilled user of the remote, the impersonal, the public voice; we live in an era that values the psychological, the personal, the private voice. And Milton is an experimenter in genres that are no longer viable today-the descriptio, the classical pastoral, the court masque. The least accessible of all of Milton's poetry, it seems to me, is the early poetry, for whereas Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes have narratives, psychological concerns, and thematic issues which interest the contemporary student, the earlier poems seem more remote, more ornate, and less obviously relevant to students today. The first time I taught a course in Milton, in the fall of 1975, I became painfully aware of these problems and how they interfered with the students' enjoyment and understanding of Milton's work, especially the early poems. In that course, I took a fairly standard major author approach to Milton's art, an approach patterned after my own undergraduate Milton course. I began by delivering introductory lectures on Milton's life and on seventeenth-century historical and philosophical background. I then assigned the early poems in their chronological order of composition, beginning with On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough, and gave traditional close readings of these short works before moving on to Paradise Lost. The results of this thorough, well-researched, tightly-organized approach were poor at best. Although the better students were interested, involved, and learning, the majority of

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WHEN W. NELSON FRANCIS said that, he didn't have it in mind to fun nobody. For sure there was no way he could have knowed, twenty years ahead of time, that his words would look like something meant for a bitter joke today. The revolution he was talking about (using structuralist linguistics to teach English) hasn't happened vet, to begin with. And to go on with, another one-generative transformational linguistics-has come along in the meantime and turned out about as useful to a teacher as a rubber crutch. The structuralists and the transformationalists haven't either one of them come up with the sweeping consequences Francis was so sure about. Structural linguistics gets used mostly in foreign language classes; and transformational grammar, in spite of two three papers saying that it might could be a little bit of use after all, has swept right into and right back out of English classes, leaving precious little behind itmaybe a good word or two said for sentence-combining exercises.1 There was the Roberts English Series, poor sorry thing, that no doubt meant well; all it did in the long run was teach a whole generation of English teachers to despise transformational grammar forevermore. Chomsky himself, they'll tell you, said T-grammar had no place in anybody's English class, and they're with him on that; by now you won't hear much else said on the subject amongst teachers. Seeing as how all this is true, it's purely radical of me to say that I disagree with all that; it's radicaller yet to say I think I can prove I'm right. Let me get the radicalities over with first off, then, by saving that six years work has got me convinced that transformational grammar for sure does have a place in

In that twenty-five-year series of books and articles spotlighting poor Johnny's writing and reading problems, educators and laymen have offered dozens of reasons for Johnny's plight. Some blame too much TV watching; some blame progressive education and the drift away from basics, phonics, and grammar usually; some criticize school systems that have switched to new forms of grammar, like transformational, which may have confused the kids. The reason Leroy writes poorly is that he can't hear the sound of his voice on paper. He's the high school kid who says to his English teacher: can tell you about that story, but I can't write it. Hle's not kidding. He has the voice for it, he can even get excited about it, but he doesn't have the training to put that voice on paper. So what's the solution? Well, let's look at Leroy's problem a bit more closely-and maybe the reason our schools produce so few really good writers. If you write well, you will have no difficulty reading the sentences belowaloud. Want to try it?

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the school was four to one. Why don't you hire your thirty three best applicants, whoever they are? I used to harangue him, under mental shades of the heroine of My Sister Eileen proclaiming Get the marines out of Nicaragua! Why don't you hire thirty three women, or none at all, depending on the quality of your applicants? He used to look at me with kindly amusement, in the spirit of Dr. Johnson contemplating female preachers. This was many years ago. Since the excitement over women's lib in the sixties, I have wondered whether my professor ever remembers me. I spent two years on his staff, and have now spent twenty teaching elsewhere. I say all this by way of proving my credentials. I consider myself one of the relatively rare feminists of the fifties, still fighting. As such, I feel compelled to state that I find the present interest in 'women's literature' degrading, and the teaching of women's literature in English departments a subversion of women's liberation. The whole point of leaving the doll's house, I would have thought, was to become a person among people, to be what one wanted to be. If one chose to be an English teacher, it was because one had an interest in literature; one didn't have to astonish the professors, or to decorate a campus, or to confine oneself to books on childbirth. If one chose to write fiction, it was because one wanted readers to say What a fine novel, not Oh, a woman! Of course, in

RECENTLY, WHILE COMPILING A BIBLIOGRAPHY on Black English, I became aware of a startling and disturbing tendency among many linguists who write about the use of Standard English by black students: those authors who most adamantly oppose the forced acquisition of Standard English often make deprecatory and calumnious remarks about female teachers. That is, those who most vehemently voice opposition to what they perceive as racial injustice are often the same ones most inclined to perpetuate prejudice based upon sex. In his now famous article, Bi-Dialectalism: The Linguistics of White Supremacy (English Journal, 58 [1969], 1307-15), James Sledd almost savagely attacks the pretty lady teacher of Standard English whose inability to understand her black victim is so great that she cannot detect the imprecations he utters unless she watches his lips. Sledd further assails this prototypic witch-inteacher's-clothing for her prissy white model sentences and rampant hypocrisy. And in Doublespeak: Dialectology in the Service of Big Brother (College English, 33 [1972], 439-56), he again vilifies female condescending culturevendors and maintains that they are the types young black males hate most. (It is curious that Sledd consistently polarizes the female teacher and the black male student. If he believes that the linguistic tug-of-war is truly of a racial, not sexual, nature, it seems he should consider all black students as victims-not the males only.) J. L. Dillard employs a similar tactic in his book, Black English. In writing about the black tradition of Fancy Talk he says:

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BY TRANSACTIVE I MEAN explicitly basing our teaching of literature on our transaction of the text. Now it might seem that many English teachers have been doing just that for a number of years-ever since we began to emphasize texts in our teaching at the expense of value judgments, biographical information, cultural surround, and all materials from either reader or background extrinsic to the text. Ever since we adopted the once-New Critical program we have been claiming that we are teaching texts. In fact, however, we can never teach texts apart from our own and our students' relation to them. We cannot even talk or think about a text without establishing a relation to it. Hence, teaching is always de facto transactive, whatever else anyone might claim. Then, by being explicitly, de jure transactive, we can make clear what the conventions of the critical profession often obscure. The old game of formalism evaded the human by concentrating exclusively on text. The new games of structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics, or deconstructivism all, by claiming a transpersonal validity for some set of rules, seek the same dehumanization (and therefore de-politicization) of literature. The thing I like best in Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics is the Tel Quel critic he invents as adversary:

Theodore Ross, Gargoyles in Motion: On the Transmigration of Character from Page to Screen and Related Questions on Literature and Film, College English, Vol. 39, No. 3, Teaching Literature (Nov., 1977), pp. 371-382

SINCE I BEGAN teaching Shakespearean drama nearly a decade ago, I have tried a number of different approaches-with varying degrees of success. It was clear from the very start that the key was to discover an adequate substitute for the live performance. But what? As the semesters passed and my noble experiments with theater trips, cinema adaptations, and video tapes brought more logistical and financial frustrations than I could bear, it became increasingly more apparent that the next best thing was the quality recording. At first, I used recordings in a manner familiar to most instructors. I carefully chose a few key passages or scenes (sometimes even an entire act or two) for playing in class, and followed these selections with analysis and discussion. This worked reasonably well, but consumed considerable chunks of class time. I decided to modify my approach. Instead of taking precious class time to play the records, I scheduled evening record listening sessions (RLS). Happily, this approach proved to be so successful, and popular with students, that I have been using the RLS format (with periodic modifications and refinements) for the past seven years. Although I have used it only in a college-level Types of Shakespearean Drama course, I am confident that with minor modifications it can be used with similar good effect in the secondary level Shakespeare unit or course, and in all types of drama courses on both levels. The following is a brief description of the RLS teaching approach. During the first class period I announce that Monday evening record listening sessions have been scheduled for the duration of the semester. I explain that these sessions are not mandatory, but I do urge all students to at least give them a try. For students with scheduling problems, the recordings are placed on reserve in the Media Services Center. I take a great deal of care in choosing (and scheduling well in advance) the room in which the sessions will be held. Since the average recording runs from two to three hours, students should feel comfortable and relaxed in their listening environment. Mv students' favorite setting, and mine as well, has been the Honors Lounge, a quiet and pleasant room which is carpeted and filled with comfortable couches and easy chairs. The students are required to do a certain amount of preparation prior to each

As FAR AS I KNOW, Bacon did not write Shakespeare's plays. But he would have been very good at teaching Shakespeare's plays had he ever applied his inductive method in classroom. The primary goal of any Shakespeare teacher should be to enable students to draw hypotheses or conclusions from objective data of texts. We make achieving this goal very difficult, however, if we present Shakespeare to class through deduction: beginning with a hypothesis or critical premise and proceeding to demonstrate how reading is borne out, validated, by play. The deductive teaching method presents to class a neat little model of a critical essay, from which students can learn how to find further evidence in plays to support ordained premises, but deductive teaching does not show students how to begin with play-which is all that beginning students have with which to begin-and engage in a critical process that will lead them toward their own conclusions and working hypotheses. One particular aspect of Bacon's inductive method can, I think, be a useful principle for Shakespeare teachers. Deep within The New Organon, as Bacon enumerates so-called Prerogative Instances, he establishes one intriguing scientific test that he calls Instance of Fingerpost, borrowxving term from fingerposts which are set up where roads part, to indicate several directions (II, 36, p. 191). The Instances of Fingerpost designate points in process of scientific investigation at which roads divide and correct choice of direction must be made by investigator, scientist, or critic; Instances mark a separation of points during which apparent validity of two or more ideas is so balanced as to be uncertain from point after which the question is decided, and former nature is admitted as cause, while latter is dismissed and rejected. This moment for separation of hypotheses usually occurs, according to Bacon, very late in process of investigation and is usually discovered only by earnest and active diligence. As critics, those whose job it is to separate, we can find in Shakespeare's plays these points where roads part and fingerpost must be placed. As teachers, those who help others learn to criticize, we need not place fingerpost: our strategy should be, first, to allow students to begin their investigation in medias res by showing them exactly where in plays opposed hypotheses cross or con-

IN THE SUMMER OF 1975, a small group of persons in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan began to meet to discuss some tentative approaches to long-range planning. impetus for these meetings came not from a single and isolated matter but rather from a complex of events and experiences, some of them shared by everyone involved in the Department's work (some, indeed, shared by everyone in the profession) and some of them growing out of individual experiences. Falling enrollments in the humanities, new courses and new approaches to teaching within a discipline that at one time seemed comfortably defined as historical and literary (and English), the changing job market for graduates in the humanities: these were some of the factors to which we were all responding. Individually, some members of the group had been responsible for innovative programs that had already shaped changes in a particular way. Tim Davies and Jay Robinson had been deeply committed to the Doctor of Arts in English program at Michigan. Hubert English had served as chairman of both Freshman English course and graduate program. He knew various constituencies and could chart the alterations in their needs and expectations perhaps better than anyone else in the Department. My interest grew out of experience in the University Long-Range Planning Committee and out of a personal conviction that we needed to look ahead for ourselves to see if, in Curt Gowdy's memorable phrase, our future was still ahead of us. If we did not, it seemed altogether possible that others would look for us and make decisions based on criteria that we might find unacceptable. After a good deal of debate about the methods we might use and the purposes any sort of planning might serve, we settled on the creation of a descriptor questionnaire of a type that had been used by Claude Eggertsen of the Education School at Michigan in an attempt to define The Future Environment of the University of Michigan.' Our aims, of course, were far more modest than his. We simply wanted to know how members of the Department of English Language and Literature saw their discipline and their efforts within that discipline,

THOUGH I MIAKE MY LIVING as a teacher of literature, I have taught a course on mass spectator sports for the last four years. I intend to teach the course again. My reasons for doing so are serious, and derive from my political concerns as a socialist. I want to educate myself, to begin with, about an important area of culture: polls show, after all, that most people read little more than the sports section in their newspapers; I, for one, eagerly scan the latest sports results before I turn to the front of the paper. I also want the opportunity to talk to students I ordinarily don't get to talk to: those who may not have the slightest interest in literature or high culture, but are passionate about sports. Mass sports-both spectator and participatory-play an important role in our culture and in the political economy. Playing in a softball league may be one of the few ways of getting away from the miseries of the office, the factory, school, or one's family. How many boys from low-income families clutch to the reality of the American dream in the form of the multi-million dollar contracts signed by the likes of Catfish Hunter, Joe Namath, and Julius Erving? And why the millions of fans? Rooting for one's favorite team is among the few ways left for anyone to show group loyalty. But that yearning for group loyalty also allows enterpreneurs to exploit the culture of masses of people. In the current stage of capitalist development, sports is one area of the service sector still capable of expansion. Several years ago, Fortune reported that Japanese capitalists are now stressing quality of life investments. The qualities referred to are illustrated by the more than ten-thousand bowling alleys built in Japan in 1970. In the United States there is now a booming business in tennis equipment. To create the boom, working class prejudices against tennis had to be broken down; furthermore, spectator etiquette had to be transformed from a norm of restrained clapping for a well executed shot to one of raucous applause for one's favorite player or team. How were such transformations engineered? Teaching this course, I hoped, would lead me to some answers for such questions. I also meant to learn something about myself. I'm a professional: an intellectual with a proper degree of skepticism. Yet sports has a nagging hold on me. It played a significant role in shaping my consciousness as I grew up. I can't shake

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THE CURRENT back to the basics hue and cry reminds me of the story in Honey in the Horn where an oldtimer, working at the local sawmill, cut his own pay from $1.50 to $1.00 a day. When asked why he would do such a fool thing, the old man replied, Fractions make my head hurt. The profession's reaction to the public outrage that students can't write reminds me of that old-timer. We, too, seem to be attempting to avoid complication by reverting to a simpler number. To illustrate what I mean: In 1974 the Carnegie Foundation for the Improvement of Teaching gave the Modern Language Association a modest grant to finance a study of the state of the English undergraduate curriculum. Primarily, the officers of the foundation wished to know the answer to this question: How is the English profession responding to the students who are now going to college? One of the activities in the study was a national survey of the teaching of freshman composition. Four hundred thirty-six college and university teachers, directors of writing, and department chairmen from forty-nine states and Puerto Rico responded to MLA's inquiry and answered such questions as, What do you consider the main purpose of the course you teach? What is the average size of your freshman composition classes? How are the texts selected for the course?2 Quotations from this survey illustrate the divergent opinions and philosophies held about the college freshman English course.