Miss Eyre fesses up to a subversive act: teaching a lesson on the mechanics of writing. She even—for shame!—circled students’ errors on their papers and drilled them on the proper use of puncuation marks. She repents:
I know. I'm a terrible teacher. I'm supposed to assume that my students will magically figure out the rules of the conventions of the English language simply by being wide-eyed ingenues before the great literature of the world and writing about their lives, this despite the fact that relatively few of them have learned any great life lessons at their tender ages. This is what I'm supposed to do.