Though I didn't realize it at the time, from my first days as a teacher, all my classes were perforce student or learner centered, because my first job was teaching conversational English, four classes of thirty students each at Wakayama University (Wa Dai for short) in Wakayama, Japan. It was the only way you could teach a conversational English class. In 1950 I had signed on for a three-year hitch as a short term teaching missionary under the auspices of the Methodist Board of Foreign Missions. Of the group of twenty or so short term missionaries that year all but three were sent to mission schools, some to middle schools, some to high schools and a few to four year colleges or universities. I was one of the three sent to a secular institution, one of the newly invented prefectural universities. My job at Wa Dai was to teach conversational English to classes of freshman and sophomore students. Reading (literature), grammar, and composition were handled once a week by an excellent Japanese faculty, the real sensei. Our group of new teachers had all taken a crash course in TEFL methods (teaching English as a foreign language) under a Dr. Kitchens out of Columbia University's Teachers College. That two week cram course was the only education course I would ever take. Dr. Kitchens was a disciple of Charles Fries of University of Michigan, the pioneer educator in the field of TEFL. The one thing we learned that summer was that there was no way one could teach conversational English and not center his teaching on the student. Unfortunately, none of the lessons we had that summer taught us how to break through the cultural barrier of traditional Japanese teaching and learning.

It was one thing, a very nice thing in a way, to have your students rise the moment you entered the classroom and remain standing at attention until you bowed, formally acknowledging their greeting, but it was an entirely different, and not a very nice thing, for these same students to remain completely silent when asked to respond to a simple question. Nothing in Japanese classroom culture had ever allowed a free interchange between kiyoshi and gakku sei, teacher and student. Each of us had to devise a method for breaking that polite but stony silence. So long as they responded in unison, they would willingly perform pronunciation drills, repeat sentences and intonation patterns. Singly, they were silent. The icebreaker came when I, desperate for a "conversation," impolitely, approached one student in the middle of the room and asked him to repeat a sentence after me. When he somewhat painfully repeated the sentence along with the appropriate conversational response that I had printed on the chalkboard, I replied in my rudimentary Japanese, "Taihen kekko desu," which roughly translates as "very excellent." Inoue sensei, my chairman, had asked that I not use Japanese in the classroom, explaining that the regular instructors spoke excellent Japanese, and they had been warned by Inoue sensei that I would not use Japanese in the classroom. My slip so amused them, so startled them, they suddenly began to volunteer. Now, I had broken the rule, and somehow I had removed myself from the lofty plain and had descended to theirs.

At the end of the class, when I asked-in English-if anyone had a question, one brave student raised his hand and said, "Mr. Giriran [that was the closest he could get to Gilliland that first day] do you speak Japanese?"

I answered, again in the forbidden tongue, "Hai, kere domo, sukoshi dake, taihen sukoshi." Which I took meant "yes, but very little."

Then he asked me to say something in Japanese. I was so pleased that one had broken free of tradition that I replied, "Gomennasai, o-benjo wa, doko ni arimasu ka?" It was an expression from the first lesson in our World War II U. S. Army Japanese language handbook we had used in our early language training before shipping out for Japan, and it translates: "Excuse me, where is the toilet?" It came several pages after "I would like two beers, please."

Bathroom humor being universal, they all laughed loudly. When the brave one replied in English, with quite explicit directions, I headed for the door as though the question was genuine. The laughter increased. My exit coincided with the end of the class, and as they all filed out, now smiling, no longer the sober countenanced crew that had entered, each one bowed quickly, thanked me in English and passed on. From that day, I had little trouble getting each to respond to any question, to practice conversational gambits, and even to boldly go where no Wa Dai student had gone before: to attempt the pronunciation of my name, Gilliland. Humor had worked easily because it had grown out of the lesson and because I had integrated it into the pattern I so laboriously established; it was not just a joke tacked on to the end of the class, though in future I would resort, and have resorted, to such tactics many times.

Wa Dai, in the three years I taught there, had no duplicating services, few typewriters, and no formal texts, which meant I had to write all practice conversations on a chalkboard, but using a combination of hand signals and facial expressions I learned how to get the class singly or in unison to repeat sentences after me. Conversations grew out of stories I told about myself, short stories I read aloud, or questions I asked them about Japan and the area in which we lived. I discovered that holding open house twice a week gave the interested students two more hours or more of speaking and hearing English. After a full semester practicing my own methods of TEFL, I asked Inoue sensei if I might teach a literature class, in English of course, to a small group of the advanced students whom I had often met and had spoken to at my weekly open house and who professed to being English majors and future teachers of English. I explained to Inoue that reading and learning about contemporary American literature and culture would help them to speak better English. He agreed that the to learn a language well one had to understand the culture of the language, and vice versa.

For a full semester, I had been helping Inoue sensei, the authorized Japanese translator of O'Neill's plays, translate Desire Under the Elms. He had asked me when we first met if I could clear up some of the problems he was having with O'Neill's use of American slang, and I had readily agreed. While my Japanese was too rudimentary to give him Japanese equivalents, I could give him American English variants of the difficult passages. I knew the play well. Less than a year before I had read it, but it meant re-reading the play and concentrating on the language itself, in other words very "close reading" ala Brooks and Warren and the New Critics. Reading the play and discussing it in detail with the sensei that spring whetted my appetite for teaching literature, for getting out of the conversational rut of pronunciation drills and practice sentence frames.

I had neither majored nor minored in English on my BA, had, in fact, taken only the required two years of English, one year of freshman composition, one year of sophomore literature, in my case a semester of introduction to poetry (Brooks and Warren, Understanding Poetry) and a survey of world literature. But reading had been a passion from my earliest days in school, and my two years in the infantry during the war and the occupation had consisted almost entirely of garrison duty, reading those little paperback Armed Services Editions, hundreds of titles of classics and commercials, precious trash as well as treasure. Then in the period between my graduation from the University of Texas and my teaching English conversation at Wa Dai, I had discovered the writings of Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and Alfred Kazin and had come under the influence of my sister Jane and several of her friends, all of whom had majored in English. Nothing I had read before that time had been so illuminating, so interesting as my course of informal reading that year under their direction. Also, in the USIS Library in Kobe, Japan, I had found works by Van Wyck Brooks, Maxwell Geismar, Irving Howe, Malcolm Cowley, Joseph Warren Beach, Granville Hicks, M. D. Zabel, and others, all of which introduced me to a way of reading and thinking about reading I had barely touched on as an undergraduate. For as long as I could remember I had been reading the "greats" purely for purposes of appreciation, entertainment, and diversion. I was so diverted in fact that my original major, science, sank down the drain after my freshman year. As far back as high school I had been devoted to American writers like Cather, Lewis, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, K.A. Porter, Ellen Glasgow, Steinbeck, Saroyan, George Sessions Perry and, more recently, William Faulkner. Much of what I had learned about life in America beyond the Gulf Coast and piney woods of East Texas I had learned from these "greats." It seemed to me that teaching the 20th century American novel would do for my students just what it had done for me, broaden and deepen their understanding of America and its culture. When Inoue sensei agreed to let me offer the course in the novel, I immediately went to work poring through the works of Spiller, Parrington, and the others I have just mentioned, but chiefly I went to Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds, which was a revelation to me at the time. I had never been so excited about what I was learning as I prepared for the class. I had asked myself, "Is this what English teachers really do?" Leaning heavily on these works and returning to the novels I liked best, I built a course outline and ordered inexpensive Modern Library editions for my students. It was a glorious adventure, particularly for me, who had never read a novel or short story for the purpose of studying it, only for pleasure and diversion. Reading Trilling, Wilson and Kazin I learned that the highest pleasure grew out of knowing the deepest roots. On Native Grounds was a treasury of ideas, and it served as a model for understanding literature in a context other than my own narrow world of Corpus Christi or Beaumont or Austin, the latter, until my years of service in Germany and Korea, having been for me the wide-world.

The purpose of the course was learning to read the American language. Critical theory would come later for my students. In my undergraduate literature courses I had learned how to read closely for form and meaning, and had brought to each of the courses a knowledge of anthropology, psychology, history, even science, my first major as an undergraduate. Teaching conversational English had taught me how to focus on the individual student and how not to depend on formal lectures. Though I discovered I enjoyed telling stories and talking about literature, I understood that one of my stated goals to Inoue was to get the students to reach beyond conversational English and to discuss ideas in English. At the beginning of each hour and a half class period I would introduce the background to the novels and novelists, more in the form of an informal talk than a lecture. As I talked about the assigned work, I would write new words on the chalkboard, stop and make sure the class knew the meaning of the new vocabulary then move on. By avoiding assignments in secondary sources in literary history and criticism, because there simply wasn't enough time, we were able to concentrate on the novels themselves. From the beginning I decided to use no more than a quarter or a third of the class time for my "lecture" or talk about the author or the period. Each student selected one novel to study and to present to the class. I would talk about the background of the novel and the author but would limit my talk to specific topics, which I announced ahead of time. The Wa Dai library in the fall of 1951 had few resources in American literature, which was a blessing. It meant the students had to concentrate on the work itself. Outside of the regular class period I acted as a tutor, meeting individual students in my home to discuss the passages that they found difficult, not by translating them into Japanese, a task beyond my abilities in Japanese, but by suggesting alternative readings in English just as I had been doing with Inoue and the plays of O'Neill.

By the end of the year Inoue had published his translation of Desire and it had gone into production on stage. The summer after I arrived we had "finished" Hairy Ape and Emperor Jones and had begun work on The Iceman Cometh, a work which we continued to examine until it was time for me to return to the states and begin work on a master's in English. My sessions with Inoue were ideal preparations for my classes with the advanced students, for they taught me how to read from the perspective of a foreign student of English. I could have had no better preparation for graduate school or for my later job as an instructor than the three years learning how to center my teaching on students and learning how to read closely. In my year as a teaching assistant at The University of Texas, a year devoid of any instruction in teaching or even any meaningful mentoring, I leaned heavily on the classroom experience I had at Wa Dai and my work with Inoue. In my second semester as a TA I even taught a survey of literature course designed for foreign students, and in it I used everything I had learned while teaching the novel course during my last two years at Wakayama and while working with Inoue sensei. More than anything I concentrated on teaching students how to read, and in doing that everything I had learned in my freshman English came to bear. But at no time was I aware of a theory of philosophy of teaching. By first learning how to teach literature to non-English speaking students I had discovered the importance of eschewing all theory and doing what worked, and that was close reading for form and meaning along with understanding the cultural, historical, and psychological context of the work and the writer's imagination. Because my students were all foreign students I took very little for granted in their understanding of perspective or context, and as I had been required to do with Inoue sensei, I had constantly to explore ways of finding variant readings or "meanings." My first teaching job after getting my MA was at Lee College, a junior college in Baytown, Texas, and I discovered that the "theory" of teaching literature I had developed my first four years at Wa Dai and UT was immediately applicable to my classes at Lee. In the years that followed at Lee and later Cochise College, I had little reason to change the basic pattern I had discovered, but not invented, for myself.

Not long ago I sat with Jeff, a former student, and watched with fascination while he discussed with one of his students a paper the student was writing on Whitman's "Noiseless, Patient Spider." It was a good paper from what I could see and hear, detailed, insightful, and original. I was envious. When the student finished, I asked Jeff if he had a theory of teaching, and if so could he state it briefly. He had recently completed all but his dissertation for a PhD in English at one of the California universities and was far more current in literary theory and teaching theory than I. He thought for a moment, then admitted he was probably still using the New Criticism approach of close reading for form and meaning but was mixing it with anything the work itself seemed to require, but chiefly he said what he did depended pretty much on the student and his or her background of experience and preparation. He asked why I had asked, and I explained how I had never found a formula or theory that worked for all, that any theory of teaching was at best Heraclitean. It's always changing. Instead of not being able to put your foot into the same river twice, you find you can't really stick your nose into the same novel or poem twice. It never sits still. "Thank God," he said, "it's different every time." I wasn't surprised; he was after all a former student. I've rediscovered it every year since that first class in the 20th century novel I taught at Wa Dai.