Saturday, May 2, 2009

Daily Musing

Sentences like this make you wonder whether you're an effective teacher:  "I defiantly learned to not take classes taught by foreigners."

This is the last sentence of the student's essay.  It's the only line of reflection in the piece.  In class, you focused on how to end personal narratives.  You showed them examples by Susan Orlean, David Sedaris, and Gary Soto.  Images, insight, avoiding the TV show "This is what I learned" ending.

This is a white girl complaining about an Asian professor, and she makes a sweeping generalization with this final sentence.  She uses the wrong adverb.  She splits an infinitive.  

You'll probably give her a B in the class and hate yourself for it.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This makes me so sad.

Jorge said...

'MERICA!

Anonymous said...

I'm not sad because of the statement she was trying to make, even though it was pretty ignorant. It just reminds me of freshman English when Lisa and I were basically excused from attending for the semester cause the G.A. had to spend the whole time teaching the rest of class basic sentence structure. Currently, some of those morons are more successful than me...but at least I can spell successful!

PS-Thanks for donating!

reenska said...

Sadly, one of the processors at work sent me an email using defiantly instead of definitely. But she used spell check! It must be rampant. Scary that she is processing loans for hundreds of thousand dollars.