7 Signs Your Former English Teacher Is Currently Grading This Headline in Their Head

We all remember that one English teacher. You know the one—the person who treated a misplaced comma like a personal insult and acted as if the "I before E except after C" rule was handed down on stone tablets from a mountain. They didn't just teach literature; they lived in a permanent state of disappointment that the rest of us were speaking a version of English that sounded, to them, like a trash compactor full of wet gravel.

I recently encountered a legendary specimen of this genus: Mrs. Gable. Mrs. Gable doesn't just grade papers; she performs forensic autopsies on them. If you hand her an essay with a dangling modifier, she looks at you with the same pitying expression an ER doctor gives a man who got his head stuck in a banister. To her, a split infinitive isn't a grammatical choice; it’s a moral failing that suggests you probably also kick puppies in your spare time.

The classroom was her kingdom, a place where "literally" was only allowed to mean "actually," and if you used it to describe how hungry you were, she would stare at you until you provided medical proof that you were, in fact, currently digesting your own stomach lining. One brave student once tried to start a sentence with "And," and the silence that followed was so heavy you could have used it as a boat anchor. Mrs. Gable just adjusted her spectacles—which were held together by the sheer force of her own intellect—and whispered, "We are not writing a grocery list, Mr. Henderson. We are crafting a legacy."

The real tragedy of the English teacher is their doomed quest to make teenagers care about the "symbolism of the green light." Most of us looked at the Great Gatsby and thought, "Man, this guy needs a hobby and maybe a better security system." But Mrs. Gable would lean in, her eyes twinkling with a terrifying intensity, and ask, "But what does the light represent to his soul?" To which the collective class response was usually a longing gaze at the clock, representing our desire for a sandwich.

Despite the red ink that made our essays look like they’d been involved in a minor lawnmower accident, there’s a weird respect there. Sure, she’d spend forty minutes explaining why "whom" is essential to a functioning society, but you knew that if the apocalypse ever came, Mrs. Gable would be the one correcting the grammar on the "The End is Nigh" signs. And honestly? In a world of "u r" and "lol," we probably need someone standing on the front lines, defending the semicolon like it’s the last bastion of civilization.