It is commonplace that literature, paintings and musical compositions have been inspired by persons, conditions or circumstances which later become associated with the work. Nothing so dramatic as unrequited love or a dream vision lies behind Reflections, of course. Instead, it came about because of a reckless wager that I made to a class of twenty-seven students who were taking a graduate seminar in materials development from me in the spring of 1973. As nearly as I can recall, I said, "You appear to be a very large, talented, and energetic group of people." (Smiles.) "How would you like to try your hands at producing a textbook?" (Fading smiles.) "I'll bet that if we really tried, we could put together a book of readings—an experimental reader—that would be a great deal better than anything around. . . . Would you like to try?" (Muttering and mumbling.) Finally, a hand went up and a clear question emerged: "Will you teach us how to do that?" And I replied, "I've never done this kind of project with a class before. Maybe it's too ambitious. But I think that we'll all teach each other. Shall we try it?" The class looked eager and pleased. The consensus was clearly affirmative.
In retrospect, I have come to these two judgments:
(1) The work that we did in those fifteen weeks provided us with the most difficult, complicated and gratifying learning experience I've ever had in my twenty years at the University.
(2) Classes and moments in time are unique, and the possibility of repeating this experience with other groups of students is extremely unlikely.
The difficulties were academic to begin with. Should we develop a book of readings for students of ESL or EFL? Should our materials consist mainly of nonfictional or fictional material? Should the materials be "graded" for difficulty? Should we try to present materials in thematic or topical arrangement? Should there be a consistent format for the "treatment" (questions, exercises, problem-solving) of reading materials? And so on. By mid-semester we had resolved the academic questions fairly amicably and reasonably, but other difficulties arose. As committees met to discuss and judge materials that the members brought in, feelings ran high. People identified themselves with the materials they selected. Rejection of a piece of writing was sometimes taken as a personal rejection. One afternoon a delegation came to see me in order to express its indignation over "the party line" that was developing in the class. After a candid exchange with the entire class, the tension broke when someone said, "This book reminds me of that old line: A camel is a horse produced by a committee." We resolved to eliminate the humps, and we did.
More complications occurred at the end of the semester. Every student in the class was represented by at least one piece of work in typescript. There on my desk sat nearly 600 pages of material waiting to be produced in book form: one copy to each member of the class. At this time, Suzanne Griffin began what was to become a five-year editing and field testing project. She and two classmates, JoAnne Elias and Steve Thewlis, edited copy throughout the summer. Other students from the class typed the edited copy. Natalie Reid organized a team to collate the dittoed pages. In January of 1974, the experimental reader was completed. A specimen copy of the original still remains in the Reserve Book Room of the San Francisco State University library: a 400-page testimonial to the real education of a teacher and his students.
Suzanne Griffin and I want to thank the students who brought in the selections which appear in Reflections. Because the design of the text has changed greatly during the past five years, the student contributors will not find the original treatments that they wrote—only the pieces that they selected.
John Dennis Professor of English San Francisco State University January 1979