Sorry for going off topic, but this reminds me of something.
I was very, very fortunate (as were hundreds of my HS classmates) to have an English teacher who was one of the best to ever live. She was a very odd black woman with an almost robotic, emotionless personality at times. I later realized she had all the symptoms of Asperger's and was just socially awkward and unaware. She was brilliant, but an odd duck. She was also an absolute terror in the classroom, but effective. Toughest teacher I ever had at any level of my education. Not many of her students would name her as their favorite teacher, but the vast majority would name her as their best one and the one they most appreciate.
She often spoke in third person and almost always referred to her students as classmates instead of by name. She would often say, "Classmates who stare out the window will be staring out the same window again next year!" You only showed up unprepared once in her class. After she got through with you, you'd never make that mistake again. You'd get to stand in front of the entire class while she just verbally savaged you and your dim prospects for a future where you didn't know the difference between a preposition and a dangling participle. I once watched her go off on a student who'd failed to do an assignment. She said, "If the classmate is unable to form a simple sentence and use correct grammar, how will the classmate communicate with others? Does he plan on simply screaming and grunting like a chimp?" LOL!
She'd sometimes march over to the wall and put her face 6" from it and begin lecturing it, "Wall! The teacher has been talking and talking to these classmates and they aren't listening. Are you listening and learning, wall? Do you understand? Wall, do you know what Faulkner was trying to say here? No? Well I guess you weren't listening either!" and on & on she'd go for a few minutes while you just wanted to die of embarrassment for not knowing the assigned material or not being prepared. I watched her lecture the wall dozens of times.
My oldest daughter had her during her final year of teaching and said she was exactly the same.
Anyway, she was extraordinarily tough and didn't care if you were rich or poor, black or white, or anything else. You WOULD learn. There was no "or else" option. When I got to Bama my first year, freshman English was supposed to be brutal. I thought it barely qualified as a refresher course for Ms. W's sophomore English class. It was a joke. I literally thought it was like a HS remedial English class. I couldn't understand why everyone else was struggling. I never had a single English or Lit class in college that was half as hard or in-depth as what I'd done in my two yeas of Ms. W's classes. And the issue wasn't that Bama's English Dept. wasn't hard. A classmate who graduated from Harvard said the same thing: he never took an English or Lit class at Harvard that was even close to what we'd done as HS sophomores. Same from another classmate who went to West Point. A woman I went to HS with who is still a good friend got her MA in English and says the same thing. We were doing college and grad level work in HS in Ms. W's classes. By the time we finished college, we had a whole new appreciation of her as a teacher.
A few years ago, my home town created a teacher's hall of fame to honor the best teachers in the town's 150 year history. She was one of six members of the first class inducted. Almost 900 of her former students, myself included, belong to a Facebook fan page dedicated to her. Her niece is an old friend and member of our group, and she shows her aunt all the comments (and there are a lot), and her aunt finds the whole thing amusing and unnecessary, but is flattered. A few months ago on her 81st birthday, hundreds of her former students posted well wishes on her FB appreciation page. Her niece said she showed her all the comments and her aunt recalled every single one of the names and what years they were in her class. Somebody recently posted that every time they read the poorly written, can't spell, can't use proper grammar, no clue about punctuation garbage that most people post on FB, all he can think is "Lord, those poor, wretched, illiterate savages weren't fortunate enough to have had Ms. W."
. After 45 years, I can still hear her voice in my head as clearly as if I'd spoken with her five minutes ago. Best teacher I ever had.
