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What are we former students of the New Critics to think of Catch-22 and all the praise heaped on it, for more than a decade now, by English professors? If sentimentality means what we thought it did (invitation to unexamined response, indulgence of inappropriate emotion) and as bad as we thought it was (an insult to serious readers, an abomination to people in universities) then, if we are still able to read as we were taught to read, Catch-22 thoroughly sentimental and not worth teaching. But apparently most college teachers, like most American intellectuals, do not see the book this way. I have in my office three collections of Catch-22 criticism that have been offered to me, in the last two years, for classroom use. They hardly acknowledge that a reaction like mine, like ours, possible. The editor of one of them, Robert M. Scotto (Joseph Heller's Catch-22: A Critical Edition, New York: Dell, 1973), tells me in his first sentence that Catch-22 is our contemporary classic, and appends eight critical essays that show no sign of disagreement. Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald, editors of A 'Catch-22' Casebook (New York: Crowell, 1973), declare in their second sentence that they feel, without reservation, that Catch-22 a masterpiece. Of the forty-six entries in their collection only three or four, by my reckoning, could be called seriously unfavorable. This in a genre commonly devoted to dialectic. The third editor, James Nagel (Critical Essays on Catch-22, Encino, Calif.: Dickenson, 1974), advertises controversy in his collection, and says that nearly all the key issues remain unresolved and continue to be vigorously debated, but the controversy we see mainly over what the novel really about, or whether the disjointed time scheme functional or not, or whether Yossarian an epic or an existentialist hero, and so on. Though there some debate over how bad the writing and how stereotyped the characters are, and some discussion of how functional these crudities and stereotypes may be, Nagel's introduction heavy with respect for Heller's art, and only two of the nineteen essays he collects are unfavorable. One of these a one-page review. Through all these collections the student will hear little debate on the kind of question that seems, that once seemed, vital to me, to us-whether the novel will stand up to and reward a hard, critical reading, or whether it will break down, whether it sentimental. Instead he will hear many tributes and claims that link the novel to the questions he finds vital in our time: that Catch-22 a brilliantly comic attack, long before the Vietnam war, on all the stupidity and

THOSE OF US WHO FOLLOW a write-from-your-own-experience philosophy in teaching Freshman Composition consistently run into one problem: a batch of trivial narrative papers to read each week. Following the lead of Ken Macrorie, Donald M. Murray, and, more recently, Joseph Comprone, we take this approach to keep our students out of the depths of the library, where they would spend hours researching a boring subject to an artificial and boring paper, and at their desks engaged in the process of writing, where they belong. Freshman writers, we believe, are apprentices in a skilled trade-writing-and like carpenters' apprentices need material to practice their trade on. But novice carpenters are not sent to the lumber mill to pick up their own materials each day. They keep hammering and sawing and all the material they need is kept at their fingertips. Freshmen have all the material they need for writing at their fingertips, too: their own experiences. Too often, however, they fashion those experiences into a dull, firstperson narrative of What I Did. The genuine significance of what they did lies undiscovered and undeveloped. The challenge for writing teachers is to help the beginners examine their experiences critically and turn the corner from simple narration to wider meanings and truth in their writing. In my freshman English courses I shy away from relevant or significant assigned paper topics. In fact I make no assignments at all other than that writing teacher's cliche, write about what you know. When I do get a paper entitled Pollution or Inflation I ask the writer how much substantial information he has to pass along to his readers. Does he really know the ins and outs of economic theory, for example? The answer is invariably no. A budding John Maynard Keynes is rare these days. Then I have two options. I can send him to the library to research inflation, in short to pick up a quick course in economics. Then he can a research paper, that exercise in footnotes and boredom. Or I can tell him, Write about something you know more about, something you've had some experience with. the next week it's My First Day in College. After three weeks of revision it's a well-honed My First Day in College. Full of hard-hitting specific detail and crisp dialogue, it still makes me yawn. I find myself repeatedly asking, So what? Simple narration, I reasoned, is the mode for best presenting unique experiences

IN SEARCH OF A MORE EFFICIENT, effective, and individualized way to teach composition, I have been experimenting for several years with first-sight, in-class reading of students' writing as the entire business of classroom meetings. The exact reproduction of students' papers, necessary for profitable in-class reading, has been, until rather recently, so burdensome that it made fulltime in-class reading impractical, but recent technological innovations have made it easy. This several years' experience has convinced me that fulltime, in-class reading serves the teacher, the student, and the discipline so much better than any other way I know that I offer it here for the consideration and criticism of other teachers in the hope that it might help them and they might improve it. During the first meeting of a term, I explain the purpose of the course, the types of writing we will be doing, the style levels we will be attempting, the final manuscript form required, and give the first of the eighteen weekly writing assignments. I specify only the style level and expository genre and leave choice of specific topic to the students, encouraging them to write on something interesting that they know more about than we, their classmates and I, do. During the second meeting, we discuss the use of the two reference works used in the course: Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 8th ed., and Perrin's Writer's Guide and Index to English, 5th ed., this last to be read a chapter a week and selectively according to the needs of individual students. During the third meeting, I explain and demonstrate how we will read their writing in class, and I collect their first papers. After the third meeting, I take their typed papers and make a thermal transparency and a thermal ditto-master of each page of their writing and run off a ditto copy of each page for each student. At the beginning of the fourth meetingand every third meeting after that-I distribute the dittos for the week. Then I project the transparency of the first page, so the students can easily follow where the changes are being made, and we begin reading, all but the writer of the paper for the first time. A teacher could read the papers before class, but I find my responses fresher, the classes more interesting, and the whole process most efficient if I read them with the students for the first time in class. We read with one question and one restriction in mind: How could we write this better? and, Let's read sympathetically and change the form and content of the author as little as possible. Students participate freely in the reading and discussion, and we read every paper as a whole against the assignment, dealing with

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WOMEN'S STUDIES IS no longer a fad. It is a reality of the academic world affecting all schools, all curricula, all students. Those schools which have women's studies programs are asking, Where do we go from here? Those schools which have no programs or courses are asking, Why not? At some level, articulated or not, faculty, students, and administrators at every school are involved in a reevaluation of curriculum as it represents and affects all of them. With the publication of Female Studies I-VII (Know, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA and Feminist Press at Old Westbury, NY) we can trace the history and expansion of Women's Studies. We can see that, at more and more schools, the interest has steadily increased. At Tompkins Cortland Community College we have recognized and begun to act on the very vital role such programming can play in meeting the special needs of students at the community college. The community college student population is diverse. Some enter directly from high school, and some have been out of school for over twenty years. We have more and more students who are attending school parttime. Many have other obligations-jobs, families, community commitments. We have excellent students and students with serious remedial problems. And, of course, we have students who know exactly what they want to study as well as those who need much vocational and personal counseling. The community college, I believe, is one of the few institutions flexible enough to meet these varied needs. And women's programming is a significant aid to this flexibility and responsiveness to the needs of the community population. When I talk about Women's Studies courses, I mean courses which are primarily concerned with awakening students to the situation of women in society and which aim at stimulating reevaluation of traditional educational and social practices. Once students become aware of the secondary status of women, it is my hope that they are no longer content to accept it but get involved in attempts to initiate change. Basic to Women's Studies is a recognition that method is as important as content. This recognition implies changing the attitudes inherent in a hierarchical teacher/student relationship. It is important to encourage a collective searching for and sharing of information rather than vying for grades or personal ap-

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THERE HAVE BEEN CAMPAIGNS against public doublespeak as long as there has been language, and clearly they have not been successful. Responding, in part, to the language of Watergate and the general pollution of language in the mass media, our profession has assumed a strong sense of responsibility in this latest, politically oriented attempt to oppose dishonest and inhumane uses of language. It's a Sisyphean task; history and the nature of our profession are against us. In opposing public doublespeak, the question has always been what to advocate in its place. Most commonly, the alternative has been Truth, but it has been difficult to advocate truth in language without simply creating a new form of doublespeak to protect the new Truth. Less ambitious reformers, most of them in our profession, have let alone the content of public speech and advocated simpler, purified forms of expression as

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SOMiE OF THE PRINCIPLES of Eric Bemrne's theory of Transactional Analysis proven extremely useful to me in teaching English 101. The approach, which I call going backward to move forward, concentrates on three phases: writing for oneself, writing for the live audience of one's colleagues in class, and ultimately, writing for the real world through publication. The course begins with my asking students to close their eyes and to recall all the things former English teachers asked them to remember or to do when writing. Then they are asked to jot down as many of these directives as they can. Next each person is asked to write several of these on the blackboard, which was recently filled with the following: big words, think before you write, each paragraph with your main idea, follow outline forms, dot your 'i's,' don't use overworked metaphors, don't use 'when' or 'how' to start a sentence, never start a sentence with 'and,' never use 'in conclusion,' never end a sentence with a preposition, never use a double negative, never use 'never,' have an interest grabbing first sentence, never start a sentence with because, don't use the verb 'to be,' be more specific,

IN THE FALL OF 1973 I took a nationwide survey of four-year colleges and universities to uncover (1) what, if anything, had happened to the composition requirement and Freshman English during the last several years, (2) some facts about the extent and nature of the spread of exemptions from the requirement, and (3) related information about teaching staffs and loads in composition programs. The survey questionnaire, a 36-item instrument designed to yield data from item responses as well as information through cross-analysis of those responses, was sent to a random sample of 700 schools in all states and the District of Columbia. 491 completed questionnaires, 288 of them from private and 203 from state schools, were used in arriving at the final results. The results of most importance, at least to those in the profession who teach composition, can be generalized as follows: compared with 1967, fewer schools

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THE FIRST PRINCIPLE of teaching poetry is this: Poetry is a host of activities which ought not be fragmented by the teaching process. Current practice highlights the need for a statement of the principle; its validity is derived, however, from the vital relationship between three key activities: writing poems, developing an explicit poetic standard, and responding to poems. The second principle shares this integrative rationale: In a very important sense, all poetry is one poem. All poetry embodies language used excitedly, precisely, and presentationally rather than discursively; all poetry has a quality of semantic thickness which enables the respondent to participate creatively as he makes meaning of the poem. Types of poetry-romantic poetry, epic poetry, concrete poetry, etc.-comprise divisions of convenience which identify outward differences and historical literary periods; they do not contradict the notion that in a more basic sense all poetry is the same. The set curriculum of my ideal poetry course would not be poems at all, but poetics. This derives from my second principle-if all poetry is one poem, we need to know how that poem works. Further, by making poetics,

The field of drama or theater suffers perhaps more than any other from the pigeonholing of educational institutions. Drama or theater? The question itself defines the problem. Is a course to concern itself with dramatic literature, the study of text, or is it to deal with the process of staging, the means by which the text becomes performance? In the normal course of events the English or Language departments claim the one and the Theatre Arts departments claim the other, so that the student-who is unlikely to be attached to both departmentshas little chance of coordinating with any strength literary knowledge and practical ability. The problem is understandable: if a member of an English department feels he or she would like to extend with practical work a course in dramatic literature, the facilities-let alone a theater-are seldom available; if a member of a Theatre Arts department feels a need for deeper textual analysis and understanding, he or she is liable to forego this under the pressure of producing practical results and coordinating all the various elements that become a part of that process. And so the field continues to lie uneasy in any teaching schedule because, from either end, one feels one is never communicating the whole. Poetry and the novel are self-contained literary forms whose richness is contained conveniently within the covers of a single book. Not so the play: the book is one half, the stage process the other; the two halves should not be separated, and the need for practical knowledge and involvement presents quite separate teaching problems. Under the strain of this situation, I have been attempting, as a member of an English department, to develop means whereby the theoretical and practical aspects of drama/theater can be brought closer together. The result is an approach to practical work that can be made a part of any regular course offering in draLmatic literature. This approach tries to show first, what can be practically achieved without technical facilities readily available to Theatre Arts programs; second, that textual and practical work can be combined and related within a single course, thus lessening the gap between the literary and the theatrical; and third, that there is a kind of practical work open to all students whether they have had previous experience or not. The emphasis rests on maximum physical involvement and minimal technical complication. Given an empty floor space and a group of people of varied experience and interest, I have concerned myself with

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