Two RECENT CONFESSIONS, one at home, other at school, have convinced me that all is not well with teaching of some American classics. My twelve-year old son, assigned Fall of House of Usher, complained that he could not read tale. Students in my freshman English class, assigned The Great Gatsby, acknowledged that they began to understand book only on page three. From these admissions, I surmised: 1) that my son would probably not choose to read Edgar Allen Poe any more; and 2) that my freshman class would stop reading the near end, when Nick starts to talk history. In both cases, I had my fears confirmed. Both my students and my son uwere uneasy with words, had never studied them, as words, in context-listening to their pitch and wondering, especially over troublesome ones, why they were there. They had never looked at sentences that way either. For them, literature had no music or design. It was only a story to be summarized and a moral to be fished out. There is still in classrooms today too much talking about and not enough concentration on reading literature-not on interpreting it, but on reading it, and on reading it first out loud. As a result, students don't really get to a work and come away from imaginative writing with a sense that meaning is message and that message is a statement that is memorized for next exam. Such partial attention is a disservice, not only to needs of freshman class but also to idea of literature. Students who have difficulty with vocabulary can hardly appreciate theme, and literature that is presented primarily as a fortune-cookie proverb will never be read for evidence of craft. It is no accident that too many college freshmen know about but have never really read great works that appeared on their syllabi in high school. My son does not want to read Poe because he does not understand a lot of Latinate vocabulary; because he loses thread when he has to unravel