Excerpt from The Junior Highway to English: A Text Book for the Seventh and Eight Years

Frequently during the year when we compiled the Junior Highway we breathed a thanksgiving of this sort: "Now we have something to work with in our own classes." If two men of such different temperaments, with such different experiences, in such different schools, were so agreed about their needs, there must be at least a few hundred teachers in the country who will feel as we do about "having something to work with." We believe that our unfailing agreement is a proof that the book will be serviceable in many places.

One of us gained his experience in the public school system of Iowa, acquiring a knowledge of junior high school conditions by laboring in the junior high, the other learned his trade in Connecticut, where he taught eighth-year boys from nearly every state in the Union and from all sorts of schools. We prepared ourselves for text-making by trying to earn salaries in the seventh and eighth years.

Since the two schools in which we worked were so widely separated and had such different forms, we might have been expected to find our methods widely variant. Collaboration, always a process of reconciling differences, might have seemed hopeless. Yet from inception to conclusion of our joint labor there has been no disagreement. There have been differences of opinion about some emphases or devices, but It works in my classes has settled every query. The fact is that there is no ground for divergence in practice. American pupils twelve or thirteen years of age are American pupils, whether they live amidst factories or cornfields, whether their clocks are set by Atlantic or Pacific time. Earnest teachers of seventh and eighth-year composition always discover the same fundamental facts about young minds. On these fundamentals this text is based.

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