tonight i'm going out with a couple of friends for a drink.  we've not been out for ages, and i've only seen her once since her twins (thing 1 and thing 2) were born.  i'm really looking forward to it.  i've needed a real girlie night for a looooooooooooooooooooooooong time.  i mean, i love you boys an' all, but sometimes a girl needs her girlfriends, and lately, i don't seem to have been able to see any of my girlfriends.  m thinks that the fact that the majority of my male friends being gay means that it's just the same as hanging out with the gals.  believe me, it's not.

one of my friends (you know who you are!) complained about my lack of capitalisation in this blog.  YES i KNOW i'm a bloody english teacher, but is everyone 'their job' every minute of every day? NO.  so fuck it, i'm going to write with capitalisation when i bloody feel like it.  and today, i don't bloody feel like it, and yesterday i didn't bloody feel like it.  however, tomorrow, i might feel like it.

anyhoo ... should go ... i have a meeting with the 'head' in a minute about my 'other day' when i'm not teaching.

Meanwhile, the Nats plumb new depths, as The Standard points out:

The party that purports to be going to raise educational standards can't even get the grammar right!

It's "Fewer bureaucrats", not "Less bureaucrats", John and your media team.

Anyone here for a potatoe?

[UPDATE: This one courtesy of 08wire and some young people]:

But here's the thing.  When you don't edit your documents, no matter if they are an advertisement, essay, thesis, or STAMP, you end up in a conundrum like The Fish and Wildlife Service has found themselves, which is described in the following CNN article:

Duck stamp number sends callers to sex line.

Lesson of the day?  ALWAYS EDIT YOUR DOCUMENTS.  Even if you hate it, and even if you only do it once, it protects against absolutely idiotic mistakes.  There is nothing more embarrassing than writing a stunning paper and discovering - after it's been turned in - that you spelled "their" as "there" or "your" as "you're".  There are many other examples I could use, but really, it all comes down to being aware of what you are writing.  You'd be amazed at how much a simple spelling error can cost you - just ask any lawyer.

Oh, and none of this "texting lingo" crap.  "To" and "too" are not "2"!!!

Learn proper English!

Get Every Kid a Whiteboard

This summer I purchased a classroom set (30) of 16X16 whiteboards at Home Depot for less than $30-they cut the boards for me for no extra charge. I bought a mega pack of dryer sheets to use as erasers and added dry erase markers to my student supplies list.

Kids Love to Doodle

I've been amazed at the results: kids, even my eleventh graders, love to doodle.  Every student, even the ones who usually slink into the background, often lost in their own thoughts, a million miles from the activity of the classroom, are on-task. Wondering about the room, glancing at their whiteboards, I can quickly assess if students are mastering concepts. Since their work is bigger than when they write on paper, it's easy to read from a distance, and they can hold it up for the rest of the class to see, a great way to share several student models with the class, having students learn from one another.

Whiteboard Activities

Today, I used the whiteboards in a mini-lesson on participial phrases.  Plopping  Don Killgallon's Sentence Composing for High School under my document camera, I quickly explained what a participial phrase is, showed several examples, and explained how the phrase could be a sentence-opener, subject-verb split, or sentence closer-Killgallon's terms. 

Students then used their whiteboards to practice unscrambling sentence parts of professionally written sentences (again, from Killgallon's book) to create a complete sentence that incorporates a participial phrase. As they finished, they held up the boards for me to read. I was able to read every student's sentence and have them verbally tell me if they used the participial phrase as an opener, subject-verb split, or closer. Beautiful. It certainly beats the dreaded grammar worksheets!

My next-door English teacher, Mrs. Weygandt, suggested I have students work in their groups to compose the sentences, each student writing a piece of the sentence then having the groups stand together to organize the parts. This would create a visual representation-not to mention get students moving-of the positioning of a participial phrase. I'll try that next time.

More Whiteboard Ideas

I've tried several other activities with vocabulary and reading and writing workshop lessons. I'll be sharing them in a series of future posts. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your ideas for using individual student whiteboards--a nondigital tool--in the classroom.

http://www.pdictionary.com/ ---> a basic dictionary in several language. Language is accompanied by a drawing or picture that represents its meaning

http://www.wordreference.com --> an excellent online dictionary

http://www.world.altavista.com/ ---> online translator (multilanguage).

http://translate.google.com/ --> same as the previous one, a great online translator

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ ---> a great dictionary for intermediate and advanced students. It provides not only definitions but also whole language practice!

http://www.funnylessons.com/ ---> jokes and texts to read in the language your students are learning!

http://www.shertonenglish.com/ ---> In the "Resourses" section there are great grammatical summaries and lots of vocabulary lists.

http://www.madridteacher.com/Activities/ --> Activities and games for beginers. There is some help for hispanic students in some activities.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/ ---> slang dictionary (great for teens!)

http://www.mansioningles.com/Lectura01.htm ---> Here your students can find lots of reading activities with reading comprehension exercises. The best of this site? Readings come from best sellers!

http://www.saberingles.com.ar/reading/index.html ---> More on reading comprehension

http://www.englishclub.com/reading/index.htm --> Reading comprehension y actividades de vocabulario

http://www.ego4u.com/ --> English Grammar Online for you is a very complete website where you will find everything you are looking for: grammar, vocabulary, readings and writings.

http://www.theirregularverbs.com/ ---> A very exhaustive irregular verbs list.

Podcast Section:
Here, you will find links to sites where you can download audio or video podcasts in English. These are semi authentic and authentic material (that is, material adapted for students and material from daily life). To download the different podcasts, follow instructions on each site. Generally, you have to right click on the links and then choose "save target as"

http://www.eslpod.com/website/
http://critic.typepad.com/speakingenglishpodcast/
http://www.eltpodcast.com/ (this one provides audio material and the transcriptions too!)
http://www.podcastsinenglish.com/index.htm
http://www.betteratenglish.com/

As I always say, "Provide your students with tools to improve their own language alone. Then, you will see how far they can go in a really short time"

I can't decide if this makes me more or less likely to give a tip. On one hand, the mistake is a turnoff to a nerd like me. On the other hand, the employee who created this sign clearly needs educational assistance. Perhaps tip money would help.

20 Grammatical Errors

The one that really annoys me is how people suddenly seem to confuse "have" and "of", as in: "I could of learnt how to write properly." There's no excuse for it!

Read the full article.

Me: documents are usually "produced to the meeting" not "reproduced to the meeting".

Reply: the documents were produced at minute 4 and are merely produced a second time when being considered individually (hence "reproduced").

You couldn't make it up if you tried!

The issue this week with which we find us ourselves confronted is one which is close to my heart. It is a phenomenon wherein even many professing grammaticians have fallen astray, and I find that grievous. Oh unhappy day for the language! I would that this blight never came upon us! But, alas, readers, it has. And must be faced, even amongst the tattered remains of standard English grammar.

And so let us begin by introducing our quote of the week; this seemingly flawless excerpt from a recent blog:

I tried to keep her on the right track, but I think this only served to increase the distance between she and I.

- Full moon

As the human amongst us would have presumed from the title of this post, the phenomenon we are investigating, and to which I so woefully referred in my introduction, is that of the personal pronoun. Do you spy anything untoward with the pronoun usage in this quote? Many wouldn't.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let us briefly consider, what is a pronoun? and, more specifically, what is a personal pronoun?

• Well, firstly, a pronoun is word substituted for a noun in order that the noun does have to be repeated superfluously. For example, 'This is George's blog; it is pants.' There was no need to use the noun-phrase George's blog twice, due to the the two statements' close proximity and so in the second instance it was replaced with the pronoun it.
• A personal pronoun is simply a pronoun used in the context of referring to a person. For example, 'This is George's blog, his writing is pants'. His is used in the stead of the noun George in the second instance to avoid unnecessary repetition.
• I couldn't be bothered to scour the Internet in search of a satisfactory personal pronoun table and then probably get sued for using it, so I shall type one out and I apologise in advance if the formatting renders it unreadable:

Person..Subject...............Object..................Possessive...........Intensive reflexive

1st........I/we....................me/us...................mine/ours............myself/ourselves

2nd.......you....................you.......................you/yours............yourself/yourselves

3rd........he/she/them/it....him/her/theirs/it....his/ hers/ theirs....himself/herself/themselves

Right (few minutes later) well that looks perfect on my PC, dunno about yours, but let's proceed. We're all clear on what personal pronouns are, yes? Now let us return our attention to the quote I quoth above (ignoring my both archaic and misused verb). The bit with which I have beef is this 'the distance between she and I' business.

Basically, there are two phenomena we need to consider in relation to this issue. The first led to the second. It is the second we are are interested in today, and which we find in our quote of the day. Just briefly, however, I shall explain the first for the sake of clarity!

A while back, there was a mass crack-down within the grammatical globe on the personal pronoun; very rightly phrases such as 'John and me are reading George's blog' were exposed as nonstandard. The confusion seems to arise mainly when there are two objects in the sentence with pronouns.

A good, basic principle to apply when deciding which pronouns to use when there are two subjects is to decide which you would use with only one object. Consider:

• I am going to read George's blog - a perfectly grammatically standard statement. Let us now introduce a friend:
• John and I are going to read George's blog - the first person pronoun doesn't change! It is still I.
• So John and me are going to read George's blog is nonstandard and should not be used.

BUT, and this is such a significant but I have emboldened it and capitalised it, these days folks tend to go too far towards the other extreme! And it is this that has given birth to this new phenomenon with which we are faced today; the second phenomenon. Which irks me so! You see, it is as if the pronoun me, which as we can see from my lovely table above is the first person singular object, has become a dirty word! It is not! Yes, it should be I instead of me in certain contexts, but that does not mean you have to go putting I's* willy-nilly all over the place, does it?

So let's look at our quote (eventually! though you may exclaim). We shall use a similar process as above, and build up this sentence from an undeniably standard one, thus:

• Pass the beaver to me - one surely can't quibble with that grammar, and so:
• Pass the beaver to Joanna and me - still OK?
• Pass the beaver to her and me - yeah?
• The distance between her and me.

Do you see my point? There is no thing wrong with saying her and me, it's just 'cause the poor phrase carries such a stigma these days! So much bad press! Well my message today would be lay off her and me! And, please lay off the the her and I 's and the she and I's and the John and myself's and the please see myself regarding's etcetera.

Have a go yourself. Please read the following statements, decide whether or not they are standard, then highlight the text betwixt the [ ]s to reveal my answer...

'The beaver and I played burp tennis' [yes!]

'The beaver and I playing burp tennis, Sept '08' [no! ]

'The beaver and me read a blog' [no! ]

'The beaver and I read a read a blog' [yes!]

Just remember: think about how it would be if there were just one object, and take each case individually, do not just opt for one or the other because you think it's 'proper'.

And if you don't, well say hello to my scorn and I! [no! ]

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

Gee. x.

*See last week's Blogrammar for my justification for using an apostrophe in this context.

]]> http://tahazaidi.wordpress.com/?p=75 Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:01:24 +0000 tahazaidi http://tahazaidi.wordpress.com/?p=75 To,

The Manager

Bank Al-Habib

Water pump branch

Karachi

Subject: Non-delivery of the ATM card

Dear Sir,

I m a customer of the bank, holding account # ****-**. I had submitted the form for the acquisition of ATM debit card in July. I was supposed to get my card in the mid of the said month. But still I m yet to receive it. I have let known of the non-delivery to the personnel holding the office several times  and was sent away with just promises.

With all due respect, does the level of your staff’s incompetence knows no bounds? I need that ATM card to cater to my daily needs and I have already suffered a lot because of the non-prompt delivery of the subject.

Kindly, look in this matter and act in a fashion that I receive my ATM card with in a couple of days.

Anticipating

Syed Taha

House # R-***/**, across the street.

Ph. # *******

 2nd letter

To,

The Manager

Bank Al-Habib

Water pump branch

Karachi

Subject: Non-delivery of the ATM card

Dear Sir,

I m a customer of the bank, holding account # ****-**. I had submitted the form for the acquisition of ATM debit card in July. I was supposed to get my ATM card in the mid of the said month. But still I m yet to receive it. I have submitted with you a query letter on 31^st July to inform you of the non delivery of the subject.

Now I request you to kindly issue me a new ATM card so that I m not deprived of my right to enjoy the facilities provided by the bank (or follow what ever the procedure says).

Kindly, look into this matter and act in a fashion that I receive my ATM card with in a couple of days.

Anticipating

Syed Taha

House # R-***/**, across the street.

Ph. # *******

PS: there must not be any deductions from my account in this respect as it is totally a matter of your or your staff’s sheer incompetence.

If you spot the error, click on the “comments” link at the bottom of this blog post and write a comment identifying and correcting the error. It's worth 2 points extra credit -- the first person to get it right gets the points. (If you identified one of the errors shown in the previous blog posts, please do not answer this one. Give someone else a chance.)

Now comes a new one that grates on my nerves. I’m good.

How are you today? I’m good.

Would you like another slice of cake? I’m good.

Can I give you a ride? I’m good.

I guess it was only a matter of time for such empty-minded replies as cool, neat, swell, hot, and other quick comments to reach the point where something far grander (like awesome) needed to take their place. It’s frightening to think what may supplant that overused (and misused) descriptive in the future. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious maybe?

But what in the world is the purpose of picking up the catch phrase, I’m good? Why doesn’t it make everyone cringe? Why doesn’t the dialog go something like this:

Tom: Can I give you a ride to work in the morning, John?

John: I’m good.

Tom: I didn’t ask for a character reference. Do you need a ride tomorrow?

It’s comforting to know that mindless verbiage eventually goes out of style. If you’re old enough you may remember when conversation was so garbled with the phrase, you know, that you almost needed a road map to discern where the speaker was going. Already awesome seems to be fading from the vernacular and, I’m sure, I’m good will go out of style. But (cringe) I can’t help but wonder what distortion of good grammar and language is waiting in the wings.

]]> http://millicentandcarlafran.wordpress.com/?p=36 Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:24:29 +0000 Millicent http://millicentandcarlafran.wordpress.com/?p=36 Dearest Carla Fran,

I am sorry to hear about the stray verb that marred your cover letter. Those little things can disturb one so afterwards--even vicariously, as I can attest.  I heard a student yesterday use the word "brung" to a professor during a seminar on the Augustan Age. It bothered me enough on his behalf that I dreamed of the word "brung" last night. I woke up  feeling like the wizened grammarian I am, and wondering whether I should at long last read that book Eats, Shoots and Leaves. This led me to think about an ex-boyfriend who loves that book. He's a brilliant swing dancer, doesn't believe in God, and is getting a doctorate in neuroscience. I wished for a moment that I knew what he knew.

I will say, though, that one misconjugated verb does not--and I think Strunk and White would agree--a cover letter make or break. The student's comment was actually quite brilliant, and the professor spent more time addressing it than he did on any of the other better-conjugated but less interesting remarks.

I spent more time with Meg Ryan. I agree about the overall "blurghiness" and I'm bothered too by the amount of product in Meg's hair, the curls of which remind me of window tassels or gift-wrap ribbon corkscrewed by scissors. I don't know why I never reacted this way to Debra Messing's curls (which were similar) during her stint in Will and Grace.  Maybe the color helped. It's like an overly manicured garden--there's very little pleasure in such a thing. You can't imagine it ruffled by a snuffling dog or happily hosting a picnic.  This grieves me, as Meg's hair has historically evoked the dandelion more than the orchid.

This, I think, supports my aesthetic objection to the over-plucked ab-defined orifice-waxed cellulite-free woman. A body that consumes that much mechanical work (in the sheer physics sense) can't possibly have a sense of humor about itself, and is committed to an unnatural stasis. A body in motion stays in motion, but a body that's being constantly pruned and weeded hearkens back, in a sad Sisyphean way, to the Bantu tribesman hacking at the jungle as it encroaches on the area he cleared for farming. I suppose it's the confusion in our culture about evolution, conservation and preservation--the first is inevitable, the second is commendable, but shouldn't the third should be the exclusive province of museums? Even Snow White finally climbed out of her coffin.

I can't decide whether or not to count the re-appearance of Meg, Annette, Debra et al as a victory. In one way, yes--the same way that the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Part 2 is a victory. Only with older and funny actresses! Hurrah! But why oh why are we (and they) in the abject position of having to accept and promote such a script? Why do we have to celebrate such blurghiness, such mediocrity?

I went shooting again. It was less fun. On the left of us were two large pink boys, the kind whose heads seem both cylindrical and square, each with a stiff little brush of hair at the top. They were shooting their own guns. The .44 was aerodynamic and pretty, which somehow made it a hundred times scarier than our Gunnie. It was a luxury gun, a needlessly big and noisy gun.

"This cartridge," Pink Boy 1 screamed, holding up a shell the size of an ultra-absorbent tampon, "can go through a concrete ______."

The shells flew out to the right and hit us hard on the head and back. They kept asking us to shoot it. We finally did. A blue flame flashes out. The kickback is painful, even after you lock every joint in your body. The noise is deafening. It's impossible to aim with such a thing so their target was a mess, but they clearly thought they were the gun equivalent of the cat's pajamas. On the right were two expressionless middle-aged Korean men who had chosen the target of the woman being held hostage by the thief (the only target, I now realize, that has anything really resembling a human, with a face and expression). They were blasting the woman's face out. When they missed and got the man, they brought the target back and taped his face over again so it would look free of bullet holes.

After I left, there was no naked lounging and no pikapika. I missed you terribly.

Fondly,

Millicent

Purpose: Hungarian is a null-subject language with both agglutinating and fusional elements in its verb inflection system, and agreement between the verb and object as well as between the verb and subject. These characteristics make this language a good test case for alternative accounts of the grammatical deficits of children with language impairment (LI).

Method: Twenty-five children with LI and 25 younger children serving as vocabulary controls (VC) repeated sentences whose verb inflections were masked by a cough. The verb inflections marked distinctions according to tense, person, number, and definiteness of the object.

Results: The children with LI were significantly less accurate than the VC children, but generally showed the same performance profile across the inflection types. For both groups of children, the frequency of occurrence of the inflection in the language was a significant predictor of accuracy level. The two groups of children were also similar in their pattern of errors. Inflections produced in place of the correct inflection usually differed from the correct form on a single dimension (e.g., tense or definiteness), though no single dimension was consistently problematic.

Conclusions: Accounts that assume problems specific to agreement do not provide an explanation for the observed pattern of findings. The findings are generally compatible with accounts that assume processing limitations in children with LI, such as the morphological richness account. One non-morphosyntactic factor – the retention of sequences of sounds – appeared to be functionally related to inflection accuracy and may prove to be important in a language with numerous inflections such as Hungarian.

When used as a verb, frequent means to visit often. Thus, to frequent a lot means to visit often a lot (or to visit often often), which, of course, is a grammar redundancy---and a grammar error.

Speaking of the business sector, nothing against it---I, myself, am a big fan of the ingenuity that brought us everything from the hula hoop to the automated supermarket self-checkout---but I find that much of the current overblown, melodramatic, redundant, trendy grammar comes from the collective conference room.

In this case, if business owners just take clients to restaurants that they frequent, that should be often enough to keep everyone in business.

Sherry

I'm in the crazy preparation period for a couple of brand new classes in a brand new environment, so I've been a little less than comprehensive in my blogging lately.  Here, then, is California Teacher Guy, come to save me with another of his observant questions.

My dear Mrs. Chili,

With eager anticipation and gratitude,
CTG

I haven't had the time to research this, but my instinct tells me that passersby is the way it is because it's the passers who are plural - not the bys (if there even were such a thing).  I'm just guessing here, but I'd say that handfuls, rather than handsful, is the correct plural because we're talking about a quantity - the amount that can fit in the hands - and not the hands themselves.  Like I said, though, I'm just guessing.

Is anyone else able to shed a little better-researched light?