Socialistic-type teachers

Courtney Murphy-Brattland, a senior at Marie Curie High School in San Luis Obisbo California, writes:

I am in California in one of the more or less effete counties, going into 12th grade AP English and I expect to get into Stanford so I am DEFINTELY not going to NOT excel, but I’m worried about my English teacher Mrs. Druding who seems to be a freethinker and not of the main-line type of thought, if you get my drift, so I don’t want her to throw me off-path from my goals. She says that this from Romio and Juliet is a sonnet but it doesn’t look like one to me, it’s all broken up.

Romeo:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Juliet:

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

Romeo:

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet:

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo:

Oh then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do.

They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

Juliet:

Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

Romeo:

Then move not while my prayer's effect I take.

Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.

They French-kiss; Juliet:

Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

Romeo:

Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!

Give me my sin again.

They tongue-suck really deep and long; Juliet:

You kiss by th' book.

But Mrs. Druding says that THIS thing by e. e. cummings is ALSO a sonnet!

"next to of course god america i

love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh

say can you see by the dawn's early my

country 'tis of centuries come and go

and are no more what of it we should worry

in every language even deafanddumb

thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry

by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-

iful than these heroic happy dead

who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter

they did not stop to think they died instead

then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

Now does that make any sense at all? Should I try to tranfer to some other class? I am desparate and scared.

- Courtney Murphy-Brattland

Dear Courtney,

That's crazy. That teacher is SO WEIRD!! This kind of left-winger cluelessness is unfortunately quite common, ESPECIALLY in the better schools, for some reason. Yes, get out of that class if possible. It will widen your mind way out, and you'll NEVER get into Stanford.

- The Grammer Genious