After her first weeks at Pennsylvania's Edwardsville High School, the visiting teacher from England was almost ready to pack up and go home. Her American pupils, she reported, "greet me with anything from 'The top of the morning to you' to 'Tallyho,' and occasionally when they are changing classes, a head pokes through the doorway and calls, 'Hi ya, ma'am, what's the scoop?' or something equally imbecilic."
But as the months passed, the Londoner began to realize that what she first took for sheer insolence was often apt to grow out of a "friendly informality of manner." By the time her...
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