Classmate Rusty Johnson remembers Miss Gould:

Through most of my public school "career" I hated English class. Learning parts of speech bored me to death, and to this day I don't see the point in diagramming sentences. I grew up in a family that spoke "correct" English and could do so myself, when I chose to. Ending a sentence with a preposition was an outrage up with I would not put.

Although I was an avid reader, and enjoyed writing, the required reading consisted of "classics" such as Silas Marner that were no doubt popular a century earlier, but bore little or no relevance to me, and if I was assigned one more essay on "What I Did On My Summer Vacation," I was afraid that I might lose it altogether.

Then I had Miss Gould for my 11^th grade English teacher.

Early on, we read Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life". After reading it, Miss Gould asked for our opinions of the poem. The students who responded praised the poem, said that it had great imagery, yada, yada, yada. Then Miss Gould asked Richard Dunn what he thought of it. Richard proceeded to rip it to shreds while the rest of the class listened in horror. To everyone's amazement, she agreed with Richard, saying that imagery such as cattle on a battlefield made no sense whatsoever. For the first time, an English teacher had told me that it was OK not to like something that was considered a classic, just make sure that you can explain yourself.

She encouraged creative writing and, whenever possible, let us choose our own topics.  When we had to do the required writing assignments, she wasn't afraid to give them a little tweak to make them more interesting. One of the requirements was to write a letter of application for a job. She gave us the assignment, adding that the letter of application was to be for a job working for The Devil. I remember that one of my more creative classmates listed one of her qualifications as "kicking the crutches out from under old ladies".

Yes, there still was the required grammar.  A student teacher happened to be observing the class when Miss Gould explained verbals to us. She said something like "On its mother's side it's a verb, and on its father's side it's a noun". Then as an aside to the student teacher, but loud enough so that we all heard it, she added "Throw a little sex into it, and they'll listen to anything".

After the 11^th Grade I saw English Classes in a whole new light. When I moved on to the University of Maryland, I was an English major.

And it all started with Miss Gould.