[CatoRenasci]

And when I was in high school in the early 1960s, we were stuck with the likes of Silas Marner... which set in me a prejudice against female novelists that took years to shake.

Then, sadly, other than in history where liberalism reigned, the political correctness was conservative. As a sophomore, I had an English teacher who downgraded any work she found inconsistent with her own very fundamentalist religious position. I could understand her not wanting us to read Lawrence Ferlinghetti's quasi-erotic Beat poetry, e.g. The Coney Island of the Mind, which was, however, in my view rather tame and harmless, but, with her, even Theodore Dreiser and H.L. Mencken were taboo. At any rate, I became annoyed when she gave me a "C" on an essay I thought was good, but took a decidedly Menckensian line. So, I took it to the local state college where I knew the head of the English department. He circulated the paper to the department as a college paper, and the comments all came back positive, with no less than an "A-" On my next essary for the old bat, I wrote a purposely bad essay which took positions I knew she would like. Of course, she gave me an "A", while the state college English department thought it, at best, a "D-" effort. I then dropped copies of both papers with the college professors' comments on her desk, and on the principal's.

Fun was had by all.

[Ditto]

And when I was in high school in the early 1960s, we were stuck with the likes of Silas Marner... which set in me a prejudice against female novelists that took years to shake.

Ugh! Deadly dull for a teenage boy. I hated every word of it.

[7thson]

I wish that I had the English text that I read back in high school. There was one story - a sci-fi story - where there was a planet full of blacks. What happened was that when space travel was possible, all the blacks left earth and created a utopian society on a distant planet. Now, the last surviving whites were coming to their planet because they destroyed Earth and were begging forgiveness to come live on that planet. The leaders of the black planet were debating whether they should let this happen. I kid you not - this was a story in the text! Even back then, I knew that was full of it.

[O.C. - Old Cracker]

Did the positive reviews of your essay by likely leftist-leaning college professors help to improve your grade? I guess you really showed your sophomore English teacher, huh?