I. Points to learn about writing
1. Starting with an anecdote to engage the reader or make your writing interesting.
… Miss O’Neill would lift her wig and gently scratch her pate. She did it absently, without interrupting whatever she was saying or doing.
2. Shift of point of view
A. Children’s perspective (collective) ---- misconceptions----unreliable / disaffection for Miss O’Neill
1) …it was the consensus of my more sophisticated peers that Miss O’Neill had, until very recently, been a nun.
2) Miss O’Neill, they whispered, had left her holy order for heartrending reasons….
3) We never knew Miss O’Neill’s first name (teachers never had a first name), and ….All teachers are old.
B. Parallelism is used to build up the tensity of disaffection for Miss O’Neill
We had to designate the function of every word and phrase and clause; we had to describe how each part of every sentence worked; we had to explain how the parts fit together, and how they mesh and move to wheel out meaning.
C. Climax is reached when the children voice their rage “Get thee back to a nunnery.”
D. Transitionary paragraph indicates the turning point of feelings and emotion and achieve the coherent shift
E. Parallelism is used to reveal the unity of Miss O’Neill and children.
Miss O’Neill never raised her voice, never lost her patience, never got angry. … she never had to punish or even threaten to our most ingenious trouble-makers. For some reason, we never discovered the small impertinences and sly infractions and simulated incomprehensions … never seemed to get anywhere in the tight, shipshape world of Miss O’Neill’s classroom.
F. Author’s perspective as an adult --- Personal / individual---- facts----reliable
Respect and affection:
To me, she was a force of enlightenment…. Perhaps she has departed this baffling world to don wings – and, I hope, golden locks, to replace that wig under whose gauzy base she scratched relief from itching…I hope she somehow gets word of these long-belated thanks for a job supremely well done. I have never forgotten what she taught.
3. Variety of sentences: long and short, simple and complex sentences; colloquial and formal style
But secretly, my respect for Miss O’Neill, nay, my affection --- increased week by week. For I was exhilarated by what I can only call the incorruptibility of her instruction. I found stirring within myself a sense of excitement, of discovery, a curious quickening of the spirit that attends initiation into a new world. Though I could not explain it in these words and would have scorned the Goody-Two-Shoes overtone, I felt that Miss O’Neill was leading me not through the irksome labyrinth of English but into a sunlit realm of order and meaning. Her iron rules, her crisp strictures, her constant corrections were not, to me, the irritating nit-picking they were to my buddies. They were sudden flashes of light, glimpses of the magic hidden within prose, intoxicating visions of the universe that awaits understanding. It was as if a cloak of wonder had been wrapped around the barren bones of grammar. For it was not grammar or diction or syntax that Miss O’Neill, whether she knew it or not, was introducing me to. She was revealing language as the beautiful beat and life of logic. She was teaching what earlier generations so beautifully called “right reason.”
4. Direct and indirect ways of characterization
1) Miss O’Neill was dumpy, moon-faced, sallow-skinned, colorless…She was our English teacher, a 33rd-degree perfectionist who drilled us, endlessly, mercilessly, in spelling and grammar and diction and syntax. She had a hawk’s eye for a dangling participle….
2) Some kids would break into a sweat as they floundered around failing to hit the bull’s-eye, praying that Miss O’Neill would end their agony by the generous gift of the one good and true answer. But that Miss O’Neill rarely proffered. Instead, she would turn her inquisition from the pupil at the blackboard to the helots in the chairs.” Well, class? ... Jacob, do you know the answer? ... No? ... Shirley? ... Harold? ...Joseph?” So heartless and unyielding was her method.
II. Miss O’Neill’s as a Teacher
1. Her Objective : Pure and Simple
To teach her pupils how to write clear, clean correct sentences, organized in clear, clean, correct paragraphs – in their native tongue.
2. Her Professionalism: Fair and Conscientious
She never showed any sign that she liked one more than the others of her pupils. She was efficient, conscientious, and safe from any influence of nonsense. She concentrated on nothing more than the transmission of her knowledge and her skill.
3. Her Educational Ideas
…the young prefer competence to “personality” in a teacher and certainly to camaraderie; that a teacher need be neither an ogre nor a confidant; that what is hard to master gives children special rewards (pride, self-respect, the gratifications of succeeding) precisely because difficulties have been conquered; that there may indeed be no easy road to learning some things, and no “fascinating” or “fun” way of learning some things really well.
III. Translation
但暗地里(私底下)，我对奥尼尔老师的尊敬，不，是我对她的感情——与日俱增。我坚信她教育教学的正确性，而且时常为之振奋、激动，觉得自己学有所成，更有进入到了柳暗花明又一村的境界。虽然当时我无法用这样的文字加以描叙，而且也不想用幼稚的话语天真地炫耀自己的收获，但我能感觉到奥尼尔老师不是把我引向令人费解的英语迷宫，而是领着我进入一个充满秩序和意义的阳光王国。她那铁的规矩、干脆的苛责和不饶的纠错，在我的伙伴们看来是那样令人气恼，但对我而言，它们是突然闪烁的光芒，一次又一次引导我探索蕴藏在散文中奇妙; 让我对有待人们解析的宇宙进行令人陶醉的想象。它仿佛就是光秃秃的语法构架外裹着一层神奇的外衣。不知她是否意识到，她教授的不只是语法、措词和句法，而是在揭示语言美丽的节奏和逻辑的本质。她所教的正是老一辈倡导的逻辑思维。
