RE: In defense of frustrated students
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Fri, 29 May 1998 01:17:19 -0400
> Save us from ignorant English teachers. That reminded me of my
> English teacher reading T.S. Eliot and getting to the line "Lonely old
> men in shirt sleeves" and saying "Why didn't he write lonely old women
> in shirt sleeves? Any idea?" I cringed and cringed. And that poem lost
> some of its magic.
One of my English teachers in high school used to teach us Shakespeare and
Chaucer and Eliot, and he had a knack (this happened in Brooklyn, NY, where
crudeness was not an unknown) for presenting things in so outlandish and
ribald a manner that the details remain permanently etched in my head. He
had no qualms about talking about prostitutes in Italy trying to pick him
up, or about how so many of my classmates would take the neighborhood route
of joining some arm of organized crime. It made things clear in ways that
abstractions would never have done.
When we studied Chaucer he was in absolute heaven, because all the
vulgarities and crude business was already in the text. What a guy!
It's funny, though, that in the many classes I took with him, I never read
Catcher or any other Salinger. I've often wondered why that was, because I
think he could have done a magnificent job of presenting Holden.
--tim o'connor