What is English Author:C. H. Ward Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II DESCENT TO EABTH A man who presumes to offer advice is more likely to succeed if he addresses someone in particular. To have in mind teachers in... more » general while I write is to court failure. I have chosen to imagine that "you" who read are a college graduate who has been electing a good deal of English during the last two years. You have your diploma and are engaged to teach English at the Smithboro high school. During the summer you are rather vaguely wondering whether you had better be doing anything in particular to prepare yourself for the new work. You have been assigned to freshman English, and have therefore been reading over the classics you are to teach and have carefully gone through the rhetoric you are to use. Is there more to do? You have an uneasy feeling that you don't know what is expected of you beyond exhibiting some of that critical shrewdness and exerting a literary uplift—being a center of sweetness and light. Quite by chance a friend has put this volume into your hand. Of course "you" are all sorts of people. Occasionally teachers of five years' experience know no better than to look over another man's ideas,, for they never can tell where they may pick up useful hints. But I shall always speak as if to one who has never taught, for I have known so many cases of English-teachers-to-be who would have been gratefill for some simple guide-book. Not that they would follow it trustfully (skepticism is the .only safe attitude toward any advice of the kind set down here), but that they could get some definite program, some platform however opinionated and distorted, from which they could depart. It is more useful to stir you to a procedure of your own than to persuade you to an easy acquiescence. These chapters are not to be swallowed, but to be pon...« less