Regarding the article (BDN, July 13) about the Massachusetts Teachers Test: Justin Whitton, a Northeastern grad, was incredulous that he was asked to write an interrogative sentence. Unable to, he believes 99 percent of Americans to be equally at a loss. I must be exceptional. I learned that in the third or fourth grade.

Of course, I was an underprivileged kid. For my first six school years, I attended mult-grade classrooms. I never learned how to put a condom on a banana, nor how to save the planet. Of course, I blame the teachers. They were unenlightened enough to believe they had been hired to teach me reading, writing, history, geography, grammar and spelling. As a result of their pathetic ignorance, I can read well, write a coherent paragraph, spell most words — with occasional recourse to the dictionary — name most of the fifty state capitals, discuss intelligently the root causes of the Civil War and a number of others things most of my generation can, many of us without the benefit of government subsidies and/or an expensive four-year college degree. If Mr. Whitton is an example of today’s kids, apparently this is not true of them.

For the benefit of Justin Whitton et al., here is an example of an interrogative sentence: How the heck did you complete sixteen years of school and emerge so abysmally “grammatically challenged?” Joan H. Pickering Orono

I can’t see why Northeastern graduate Justin Whitton said the basic skills exam was “garbage” because they asked him to write an example of an interrogative sentence. Types of sentences were taught to me in grade 4 and for 32 years I taught sentence structure in grade 4. Maybe if Mr. Whitton and others had learned what he refers to as “obscure English facts not relevant in a classroom,” we would not have 59 percent of would-be teachers who murder the English language, haven’t a dim idea who the Founding Fathers were and never heard of the Spanish-American War. Without a doubt Mr. Whitton reads the tabloids and knows who dated whom in Washington this past week, but never heard of Laocoon or Prometheus, and does not know R.E. Perry from M.C. Perry, or O.H. Perry, and does not know a schwa from a huh. I graduated from high school in Boston, and I had excellently educated teachers. What on earth has happened? Patricia H. Thurston Bass Harbor

Recently a teacher in Massachusetts complained that the competency tests he was forced to take were too hard and out-dated language was used when they asked him to write an interrogative sentence.

Let’s review my educational qualifications. I graduated from Old Town High School in 1972, “Magna Cum soona the bettah,” at least as far as some teachers and probably a principal or two were concerned. I graduated from Eastern Maine Technical College and am now employed in construction building trades; not exactly a scholar, I know. Now let’s try this interrogative sentence on for size, teach. Where were you when the brains were handed out? He also said that 99% of Americans would flunk that demand. Wow! It’s gratifying to know that I’m in the top 1% of the American population. Byron Ogden Bangor