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Gary D Hermann
I may have already said this, but Mr. Burnett was one of two teachers my senior year who set the stage for an immature high schooler with minimum confidence in his intellectual abilities (me) to do well in college and later in law school. When my senior year at Shaker started, our family was temporarily living near Shaker Square and I recall waiting for the Rapid Transit on the way to school, and telling my sister how I had been assigned to this English teacher named Mr. Burnett who I heard was impossibly difficult and not very nice (and who I not yet met because he had missed the first few days of school because his father died). I then noticed that there was a man standing next to us who gave me a strange look when he heard me saying all these things. I assumed it was because I was smoking a cigarette and/or because I was wearing a leather jacket and unkempt, and generally looked like a hoodlum. As it happened, I had been standing next to Mr. Burnett, who later gave me a hard time that first day in his class. I was clearly one of his least accomplished students (the class was mostly high achievers, most of whom were National Merit Finalists and Semi Finalists (the few of us who were not called ourselves "the dumb kids"). For some reason, and despite the bad start (or maybe because of it), Mr. Burnett took an interest in me, probably viewing me as a project. In any case, to my shock, I ended up doing well in his class, spent quite a few evenings and afternoons after school at his apartment reading poetry (which, at the time, I thought was stupid--and even told him so). Ultimately, we developed a long-lasting friendship. When I was in the Army and temporarily stationed at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana in 1971, I visited him at his home in Boswell and saw how many letters he had received from a large cross section of Shaker students of all kinds who obviously revered him--not all of whom were top students. High school was not much fun for me, but Mr. Burnet was one of the exceptions. A wonderful man.
Of course, as a parent, I could not help myself and drove our children crazy when I would occasionally review some of their papers and then tried to have them conform with the rules Mr. Burnett (and Strunk and White) had taught me. Years later, our kids realized how important it was to be a good writer and all indicated their appreciation for helping them move towards acquiring the right writing skills. I would always tell them how I was just passing on what I had learned from Mr. Burnett. When I later spent years mentoring an inner city high schooler (who never knew his father and had a mother who was a crack-head), I realized early on that the Cleveland schools absolutely failed to teach basic writing skills, and then made the young man understand how important it was for him to become a competent writer and then pushed him to acquire those skills. Of course, this included familiarizing him with some of the rules I had learned. Eventually, he not only graduated from college but was accepted into a Phd program. In short, his legacy has gone way beyond his students.
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