Omaha daily bee. (Omaha [Neb.]) 187?-1922, 1919-09-04
"Engl5sh A" IN France
Robert p. Utter in The Review.

| teTmE FRESHMAN cnRnSn the students called
| it. The catalogue described it as Elementary
| Composition. prescribed for all first-year men
in the university" If you ever get as close as
freshman year to an American university, you
know all about it. You remember paying good
money over the counter for tuition, and chen
trying to slip out of the shop without carrying
off the goods. thinking it huge joke on the
storekeeper. You didn't like the way the goods
were put up. They came in packages of an
hour each in the presence OF languid or
nervous young instructor. who read you his own
undergraduate themes, interspersed with pas
sages from Walter Pater and Theodore Drei-
ser, by way of illustrating matters you never
took the trouble to grasp because you knew
they were quite unessental. If you got as far
as the graduate school, you know still more
about it. By that time you were the instructor
You called yourself "section-hand," and de-
scrbed the course as Decomposition and Hit
erature, with Special Studies in the Themey
Side of Life" and agreed enthusiastically with
the colleague who described the professor in
| charge OF the course as having AN admirable
talent for organizing sawdust."
| When got to France and looked into our
! old klt-bags (the original ancestor of which
must have belonged to Pandora) we were sur
prised to find English A there along with every
thing else. 1t was like the goblin on the load of
furniture that was being removed from the
haunted house-we did not know it was going
with us. 1t must have been woven into the
very fiber of our beings, for we carried no
books nor any notes; we did not know when
we started whether we were going to teach or
sell cigarettes. We were told to include only
bare necessities in our baggage, and it never
occurred to us that English A fell in that cate
CORY. But it did. We included it without hest
tatlon or discussion in our preliminary list of
English courses for the A. f. F. university
Naturally we must have beginners course of
some kind; perhaps each heart did recall a diff
ferent name, but all sang English A-to be
sure, it was English IA by the time it
got into print but that was the registrars do
ings. Then, between the acting of the dread
full thing and the first motion, we wondered
what it would be like. There were We indeed,
the same old teachers in spite of our uniforms,
and there would be they, the same old students.
Yes but think what they had been through
CHI state alp Inferno, what will he say to
unity, mass, and conference, these three? What
will he do to English A? Catch it and throw
it back at US like hand grenade? And if he
does will it explode, or is it dud?
That was at the planning stage, and vague
planning it was of necessity; we couldn't make
definite plans without knowing who to
we were only the nucleus. 1--WE" were the pro-
fessional teachers, wearing at first the. Red
Triangle, afterwards the, Golden Cooty," the
winged torch of the educational corps-only
four Of us at the outset to stand for the Eng
lish department, representing Massachusetts,,
Nebraska, Mississippi and California After
wards we gathered them in, major, two cap
tains, half a dozen lieutenants, and as many
enlisted men. They represented among them
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, University of Penn
sylvania, Cornell Amherst, and state universe
ties with North Carolina, Texas and Minnesota
as the geographical extremes. Among the en-
listed men some Of the best of Our teach
ers. Any university might be glad to get such
a staff for its freshman course young men who
had had experience enough to make them use
full, but not so much as to turn them into
automatons.
SO without any tnkerng whatever we set
up the old machine at Beaune, cranked it, and
were delighted to find that it ran more smooth
ly in its new surroundings than ever before.
Through no provision of ours, the surround
ings had been adapted to it in three main par
ticulars English A always works by the rule
of three). First, the sawdust had been prop
erly organized for the first time in the history
of the course-the army had done the trick
better than the originator of the English A
it was spread under our feet in the class rooms
to keep the earthen floor from churning into
once we could keep the sawdust where it be-
longed, press it down into the mud; if it could
sprout in that soil whence spring the vines of
France and milk of Burgundy, then we might
accept its juice as the growth of God Second,
the men had not paid for what we had to offer
neglect it. On the contrary, being paid $50
month and found for attending the university,
they seemed to feel obliged to-carry off all they
could get. 1t becomes habit in the A. E. F.
to take anything anybody will give you. You
line of men patiently standing, and au
tomatically you attach yourself to the end of
it, not knowing whether you will get a months
pay, pair of pajamas, or shot in the arm.
1t isn't that you get something you want; you
get something for nothing. And you are not
compelled to stand in the line; if you were it
would be formation, and you would dodge it
if you could
Doubtless the old English A of the organ
lied sawdust is thing of the past, at least in
the sense in which the originator of phase
meant it, the organization of all possible "er-
rors" in the use of language into categories and
hierarches, and paradng them before classes
with all the pomp of Sound OFF, and Pass in
review 1t is joy that soon pals, this teach
ing innocent freshmen to blush at pleonasm |
and shudder at split infinitive. One soon be-
gins to question the utility of teaching students
whole categories of errors they never dreamed |
Of and turns to the more positive process OF
trying first to bring them to the point OF want
ing to write something, and then trying. to
help them express themselves. The sawdust
method is much easier; it is comparatively |
simple thing to take body of organized ma
terial assumed to be fact and pile it neatly in
minds made vacant for the purpose, but it has |
no rewards worth winning.
Popular Japanese Shade Tree.
After growing for 10 years. the japanese |
cypress, one of the smallest specimens of the |
horticultural world, reaches the size OF golf |
ball AS if exhausted with this tremendous |
eGo Tho ,ax+ ~ increase onlV bV /