I don't know why, but after 66 years I found myself thinking about my first English teacher at EHHS, Mr. Stephen Mitchell . Here's what I can recall. Mr. Mitchell was a lazy guy. I remember that on many a day he would give us busy work assignments, take up his New York Times, rest his feet in the lower drawer of his desk, and read, while the class occupied itself doing who knows what. In retrospect, Mr. Mitchell was probably a classic burnt-out case. Perhaps he had been young and enthusiastic at one time, but in 1952, he needed desperately to retire.
I remember also that in his class we read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." His instructional technique: he taught us some vocabulary, such as "onomatopoeia" and "personification." Then one student after another was asked to take a stanza and search it for examples of onomatopoeia or personification or perhaps metaphor and also to identify iambic tetrameter or iambic trimeter.
Of the romance of the Rime, we knew nothing and learned nothing.
All the while, Mr. Mitchell's feet never left the drawer.
In retrospect, I wonder whether he might not have been a WW2 veteran, not quite recovered from the trauma.
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