I just learned few days ago that one of my favorite high school teachers passed away in October. Tony Bryant taught me English at Page High School in the late 1970s. I think was a sophomore. He would always mark up my papers until they bled. I don’t remember if I made an A or a B in his class, but I remember butting heads with him. It seemed like he was most unreasonable as he pushed me to write better and better. But he really cared about the students, and he would let us tease with him. He was fun in his own opinionated, hard-headed way.
Once I challenged him on the spelling of a word. I wrote the word “coöperate,” with the two dots over the second “o.” He marked the word as misspelled. It should be “co-operate,” he declared. I pushed back, saying that the word could be spelled my way. He instructed me to go look it up. I found a dictionary in the room and located the word—spelled my way.
Of course, I took the book to him, smugly. “Well, the dictionary is wrong,” he concluded, saying that the spelling had changed in contemporary English. Now I had the upper hand. “How do you expect me to spell words correctly, then, if even the dictionary in our room is incorrect?”
