"A teacher phoned me late last night to inform me they had been victims of a scam, " she told the BBC News website.

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The book was a present from an ace teacher, a literary evangelist in classy shoes, who also flunked me, of course, with good reason.

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In short, she had a disposition that reminded me of like my high school teacher, my parents, of that generation.

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Hobson told me of one such teacher, whose students included a hugely disruptive boy.

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In fact in my years of elementary school, high school and college not a single teacher or professor asked me once how to build an addition onto a deck.

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My male high school journalism teacher taught me to write and most of my female English teachers gave me a love of literature that is one of the mainstays of my spiritual life to this day.

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