I finally decided to go back to work as a substitute. Wouldn't you know I got a call on the first day of school? I subbed five days for an English teacher that quit after one day on the job. (I cannot say anything about that. I quit my job with Pinnacle in Indiana after two days. It happens.) I was a little too confident with my English skills or too clueless to teach anything. When did high school English become strictly literature? Where is the grammar, people? Surely we aren't going to rely solely on spell check for the rest of our lives. If that's the case, get rid of the math classes because I'll be damned if I'm doing calculations without a calculator. I digress. Here is where my concern comes in. I printed out a grammar worksheet for these kids to do, and I was baffled at the speed at which they finished. Looking closer at it I realized they didn't seem to think there was a problem with the sentences. Allow me to elaborate...The first section was picking out the correct spelling of some tricky words - their vs. there, chief vs. cheif, etc. I emphasized the rule "i before e except after c" and of course one smart ass said, "Well neighbor doesn't have a 'c' so how should I know." Of course. The section section required students to put apostrophes in the right place. Lots of puzzled looks. "What is this word (apostrophe)?" Me: "It shows possession of something." Student: "What does that mean?" Wait for it... another student, "It's a comma you put at the top." Oh boy. "So you just put it on the words that end in 's?'" I kid you not he had an apostrophe on the word "shoes." It was the last word in the sentence. My favorite part of this whole worksheet was the part about putting the words in the right tense. Present. Past. Future. One student couldn't wrap his brains around the future thing. "So if it has an "s" on it, it's future tense." (The word in question was "suggests.") My mind was blown. Maybe tenses aren't covered until junior year. I'm not sure what would have happened had I asked him to diagram the sentence. (Shout out to Mrs. Walton for that one!)
