Sister Adele Bush was not my favorite teacher. She was kinda grouchy, had bite and sarcasm in her conversation, and rarely told anyone they did anything right. She was a little scary. I remember no student chatter in her classes. It was uncertain whether she liked us or not.

But she was an astute thinker. She loved literature and the English language. She really loved poetry, and told us when a poet looked at a tree, he didn't see green, he saw many shades of green.

Over summer break, everyone in grades 10 through 12 was assigned the same three books to read, usually classics in fiction. (The only title I can remember right now is Dickens' Great Expectations.) Our assignment from Sister Bush was to read the books, and write five sentences about each one. That's it. No essay or paper or test coming up. Just five sentences.

That wasn't so hard, really. You could do your best work because it was a relatively small project.

It was a shock to see everyone's perfect sentences come back all marked up in red. We had to go back and rewrite each one. However, as tedious as that was, we could see how logical the corrections were, how they improved the clarity of what we were trying to express.

Her grouchiness now seems so inconsequential. She taught us to compose a sentence, the fundamental unit of written communication and art. To care enough to insist we learn this well, to evaluate so thoroughly each one of our summer sentences, that was love.