THAT type of English teacher

Okay, first of all, I have no intention of teaching grammar and punctuation to my composition class. I'm not sure that I'm even ready to have an opinion yet as to how grammar is best "learned." My own (less than perfect) command of these fiddly points of the English language were gained in a stumbling and protracted kind of way. Most of the time I don't even know why I know what I know.
So I'm not going to take a stance on how grammar should be taught, if at all. However, I am going to do a little standing up for those increasingly vilified English teachers who are that type of English teacher. As Kenneth Lindblom describes them: "English, for that kind of teacher, is not a tool of communication to be employed; it is a standard of worth to be achieved. That kind of English teacher actively protects English Language from those unworthy English speakers who would dilute it." (95) I've never taken any kind of formal survey to see just how high the ivory towers are that these guys live in, but I have met more than a couple of English teachers and, frankly, none of them have ever really fit that bill. Sure, they will correct "incorrect" English, but not because it's somehow besmirching the purity of the English language. They do it because they love the language they've been studying their whole lives. I remember one English teacher who told me about the history of our language. It has been roughly divided into three stages: old English, middle English, and modern English. Modern English is goes back pretty far. Shakespeare is modern English. It was written hundreds of years ago but people can still more or less make out what Shakespeare is saying. The problem, this teacher told me, is that now the English Language is evolving exponentially faster. This could be due to a number of factors, increased social mobility, technology, etc. The point is that English might be as different 150 years in the future as it was four or five hundred years in the past. Things are speeding up, and because standardization slows the evolution of a language, English teachers are just trying to put the breaks on things so that we don't lose touch with the body of history and literature we've built up.
That was the theory of my English teacher friend. I don't know if there's any validity to the theory or if it's totally bogus. Either way, I'm not sure that the motivations of English teachers are quite as snooty as Lindblom painted them to be.
I'll end on a personal note. I used the restroom in Satterfield the other day and I noticed amidst the sprawl of graffiti that someone had written "your a douchebag." I really wanted to correct it. I think that a grammatically correct "you're a douchebag" would have been ever so much more cutting.