I feel that the public school system has badly failed its students in the area of English grammar. My sister took a communications class last year, and they had a grammar quiz. All the ESL students aced it. All the native English-speakers? Flunked it. Joel bombed high school French because he didn't understand what it meant to conjugate a verb. When I took Greek, our professer had to spend a whole class teaching us about sentence structure, objects and subjects and indefinite articles and the like, just so that he could explain to us what a sentence looked like in Greek.
I just started a class called 'The Structure of the English Language.' We are learning all these things that most twelve-year-olds of yore would have known. We are learning, in part, to diagram sentences thusly:
The girl next to me leans over and says 'From now on, I'm writing all my papers in diagrammed sentences. Twelve-page paper? Two paragraphs.'
After I spent six hours or so today reading about different sentence structures and parts of speech, and after Joel wrote his last midterm (finally), we sat ourselves down to play several drunken rounds of...
It's way more awesome than you think it's going to be. One of you is the Alien, and you're trying to land ships on Earth. The other of you is the Earthling, and you're trying to destroy the Alien ships before they land. It lends itself to a lot of 'Surrender, Earthling!' and 'I'm going to kick your Alien ass!' and 'Bweedledeedledeep!' Particularly when mixed with wine. Joel took this picture, saying 'As long as you're going to blog, you may as well talk about the alien game!'
As though I had nothing better to say. I can diagram sentences.
2 comments:
I have a tshirt that says, "Talk nerdy to me".
After reading your last post, I think you should have it.
blogger no longer let's me make things italic or different sizes (words, i mean)
I think it's mad at me.
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