What better time to catch up on my posting than when I've just sat down to write a lesson on compound verbs?
It's times like these that I realize I am not an English professional. I am not a grammarian, as much as I like to act like one. I don't even know all the verb tenses, which is, like, 4th grade stuff. It turns out I coasted through my academic "career," such as it was, on an instinctual grasp of English gleaned from voracious but narrow reading. This means that I can, if pressed, write like a 1950s schoolgirl, or, as more often happens, string my thoughts together in cheap run-ons imitative of the mysteries I reread as a nerdy teen. Perhaps because of this reading, and the fun I found in doing my schoolwork, I can pick out the mistakes in a church newsletter, restaurant menu, or eavesdropped conversation like that, and I'm always right.
But "teaching" grammar? It blows! When pressed to explain why a fragment is a fragment, I fall back on, "You can just tell, because it sounds bad." And teaching kids to interpret literature with graphic organizers (flow charts, pie charts, Venn diagrams), which is all the rage, goes completely against my technique of staying up all night until the meaning comes in a flash of coffee-buzzing intentisty and desperation, then turning it furiously into a paper.
I've also had to start professing a false allegiance to such bunko high school "literary terms" as rising action/climax/falling action, and my nemesis, theme. And, last week, I think I taught 30 9th-graders the wrong definition of "irony." (According to my textbook, it turns out it really is like a free ride when you've already paid.) If only I had a strong, caterwauling voice with which to profess it across the pop radio airwaves! I could do an entire album on vaguely erroneous literary-theory ballads, then live, moderately, on the proceeds for the rest of my life.
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