ABSTRACT
No training college, university, or university department of education offers an adequate training for teachers of English. When good teachers are encountered they seem to be accidentally endowed; one realizes that they could have been given nothing by training, nor, alas, would they have anything to give to another teacher if they were appointed lecturers. A trainee teacher who has won his academic distinctions with difficulty is never very responsive when he is told that he must now learn not to teach what he has learned. There are two main motives for teaching, and they both have their own dignity. One can like one’s subject or one’s pupils. Ideally one does both, but this ideal state always reveals itself to be a sort of bigamous triangle with oneself the unhappy focus of conflicting loyalties, and it is all too easy to become either pedant or pedagogue and discard one’s less-congenial affection.
