they were not just unplugged, they were unstrung, a lot of them. and these were good students.hese were good kids. so he turned that into a kind of challenging lesson. he did all the english teacher stuff, and we did, you know, elaborate structural discussions of books and metaphor and symbol and so on, and he did a lot of syntax and grammar which i love hearing them talk about it. and i try to have, play with it and have fun with it and taking my cue from mr. leon, show how sin tactical issues and grammatical issues all play into questions of character, how you're presenting yourself in prose is, in a way, the way you're shaping your soul. some of this interesting classroom ways of teaching literature was, well, they read from sylvia plath tormented poems, and the kids wrote their own versions anonymously and read them. i don't know who wrote what, but it allowed them to vent in extraordinary ways. when we got to the dostoyevsky text, the hero of the notes from underground is the self-hating, perverse intellectual who screws himself at every possible turn and yet feels superio