“2. Give me a list of books published during the last ten years that should be included in college English laboratory classes in literature. I want your list. I have my own, but fear it is too academic. “3. What are some of the things which should enter into the training of teachers of high school English? Part of our work, especially in the summer, is to give such training to men and women who will teach composition and literature in Kansas high schools. “Your help will not only be appreciated, but it will be used.” 21 To answer adequately these requests would take about six months’ work and the answers would make a slender book. And then they would exhibit the defects inseparable from a one man response. None of which excuses a failure to attempt to answer, though it must extenuate failures in the attempt. We shall try to answer, in this place, though necessarily without completeness. If nothing better than a few suggestions is the result, why--suggestions may be all that is really needed. And first respecting the things our friend is tired of and wants to get away from: 1. Fact questions about what is in the book--memory work--are not much use if they stop with the outline of the story. What is _not_ in the book may be more important than what is. Why did the author select this scene for narration and omit that other, intrinsically (it seems) the more dramatically interesting of the two? See _The Flirt_, by Booth Tarkington, where a double murder gets only a few lines and a small boy’s doings occupy whole chapters. 2. Scholarship is less important than wide reading, though the two aren’t mutually exclusive. A wide acquaintance doesn’t preclude a few profoundly intimate friendships. Textual study has spoiled Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton for most of us. Fifty years hence Kipling and Masefield will be spoiled in the same way. 3. Time serving over literature is a waste of time. There are only three ways to teach literature. The first is by directing students to books for _voluntary_ reading--hundreds of books, thousands. The second is by class lectures--entertaining, idea’d, anecdoted, catholic in range and expository in character. The third is by conversation--argumentative at times, analytic at moments, but mostly by way of exchanging information and opinions. Study books as you study people. Mix among them. You don’t take notes on people unless, perchance, in a diary. Keep a diary on books you read, if you like, but don’t “take notes.” Look for those qualities in books that you look for in people and make your acquaintances by the same (perhaps unformulated) rules. To read snobbishly is as bad as to practise snobbery among your fellows. 22 We go on to the first of our friend’s requests for help. It is a scheme for “book reporting” for college students in literature classes and he premises that an old book to a new reader is news. Of course it is.