LB >>10779234
whoa whoa whoa. I wasn't going to respond to this and just let it move on. I'm not looking down on any serviceman at all.
Some background from a letter dated Tuesday, March 23, 1943… From an enlistee that became a navigator on a B-25 464H 15th AAF
"Our teacher is a grammarschoolish woman, who uses every period to
apoligize for assigning lessons she thinks we won't want or like to do.
In which she is obviously correct. At any rate, one just written theme in class,
a twenty minute job, was inspired by a paragraph from Ruskin; our text book
(Informative Writing) called it 'Co-operation', and that was our paragraph.
I wrote a nicely impartial essay which earned me a 90, and, according to Mrs. Bikle,
was the one she liked best in the class. I was unimpressed.
We have two other English texts, "A Handbook of Revision" and "Readings in Expression",
neither of which have we yet used. The last has some rather good selections, I think.
The main point of the class so fas has been to distinguish between informative and
unrational or opinionated writing, a subtle distinction that I seem not to comprehend
very well.
On Sunday I managed to irk her a bit more by going to a 'tea' at ther home with
another soldier and disagreeing fundamentally with her in the course of the afternoon.
Her intuition is that a lieut in the army or actual service in the war would be of
great value to a would-be teacher, since his students would look up to him,
I suppose, with more respect. Well, this seemed too violent and immature for me to
swallow all at once, so I said I thought she was using a poor example as a model
for prestige, that a person after the war, and particularly a teacher,
ought to discard his connection with the Army, since holding up military excellence
or performance as a subject of prestige is imparting false values into a student.
Entirely foreign, I thought, to the spirit or intellectural and aesthetic mode of thought.
I'm afraid she got the idea that I'm terribly idealistic, but better that way I thought,
then to be laboring under her false conception of prestige and value of the military.
Of course, this is purely sensational writing and represents my own point of
view only as far as I'm concerned. "