"YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE AN ENGLISH TEACHER NOW?"

That's what Mary Foreman should have told me during a very late meeting one time. We were working after school hours on some kind of assessment or evaluation that was upcoming. And we had to be prepared to defend whatever we were doing in the classroom. I mean we were spending taxpayer money, and you know how Americans love to throw money at educating their children.

I was in my first year teaching at the high school from which I matriculated. I was in a group of teachers who had taught me English. I was getting so frustrated re-hashing, revisiting, revising language that some education expert who hadn't been in the classroom for years if ever would read and react.

Suddenly I blurted out, "haven't we already gotten that?" As soon as I said it, I thought "haven't gotten"? Maybe better than "haven't got", but still terrible syntax. Especially for an English teacher. With Margaret Ann Cummings and Mary Foreman in the meeting. Two of the most articulate stickers of the language in any high school anywhere. Why I couldn't have said, "Don't we already have that?" But no.

Neither say anything. It didn't lessen the embarrassment. They had to know. They had to remember that this student turned teacher returned to his naive and grammatically incorrect youth and uttered in an English Dept. meeting, "Haven't we already gotten that?"

So, if I still remember the moment 37 years expose facto, well what does that say about me? Anyway(s), when I see the commercial "Got Milk?" and all the alternatives, I think to myself, "Shouldn't it be "Have Milk?"