Gleanings

While searching through some of my old computer files, I found this gem that dates back to my English teaching days.  Hope you enjoy!

            Contemplating the stack of essays and homework assignments piled on my desk, I wonder exactly why it was I wanted to teach English.  These typed, 500+ word essays and handwritten daily work represent twenty or more hours worth of reading, commenting, and grading.  And they have to be done now.  (That, of course, is why I am writing this article now.)

            Reading, I locate occasional gems of intellectual insight, poetic poignancy, and superb sentence style.  Those keep me chipping away at the task.  But it is the bloopers I live for.  In their efforts to write an essay or get through daily work, students sometimes accidentally produce amazing results.  This incidental hilarity far surpasses anything that could be done intentionally.

            Probably the most common type of blooper is spelling.  Of course, some spelling errors may be blamed on the computer spelling checker.  After all, doesn’t “holy levis” make perfect sense to a computer?  One freshman described a scene, “driving on the top of the Cherry Creek damn road . . .”   If  it’s that bad, I don’t know if I want to go there.  From another student I learned that “the purpose of the Basic Algebra book is . . . [to] be ready for the second addition.”  Good.  She’s speaking right to my level.  Planning her process essay, one mom gave this bit of advice about preparing her favorite cookie recipe:  “be sure to place the mixer deep into the bowel.”  That reminds me of another one.  The opening line of a descriptive paragraph proclaimed that a particular northwest Kansas community was a “self-suppository town.”  Maybe that’s the place the cookies were made.

            Sometimes students get confused when asked to define terms.  One student, writing for a health class, coined his own term:  “Body pressure is something everyone has and is something that everyone should take care of.”  I’ll be sure to see my doctor about that soon.  In one English assignment I used to give from The Writer’s Agenda, students filled in an appositive (a noun or noun phrase that modifies or renames another noun) for each of the sentences in the exercise.  One student came up with three beauties in a row:  “1.  Penicillin, the final chapter, was discovered accidentally.  2.  Sitting Bull, the angry animal, defeated General Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn.  3.  Iran, were the Greek temple, suddenly became the center of media attention.”  My favorite, though, is the definition another student gave of a figure of speech—“being comprehensive with sentence fractures.”

            I have found that the last definition is not wholly incorrect.  Some students truly are comprehensive in their creation of fractured sentences.  Some years back, writing a critique of an article about abortion, this student had a difficult time pulling together any idea at all:  “Children and about the consequence again got pregnant of her actions and had an abortion.”  He goes on to say, “The article clearly suggested by Quindlen that the daughter, who was getting pregnant at the time was not under the influence by Quindlen . . .”  (Phew!  I’m glad he acquitted the author of any wrongdoing.)  After his—shall we say, imaginative—summary, which covered diverse topics such as suicide, multiple pregnancies, travel to exotic places, cemeteries, and illegal abortion, he concluded with an attempted opinion:  “The evaluation point was that the mothers and daughters who wanted to have rebirths of new kids was totally up to them, not the fathers.  Why?”

            That is a good question, and it prompts me to ask a few profound questions of my own.  I must give credit to my students; without them, I could never have come up with these final, provoking thoughts.  How can women commit adultery in their conversation?  How does a bosom grow strong?  What is federal funding of fetal tissue?  How do I know an inexperienced chemical when I see one?  What are we going to do about the alarming increase of illegal bears?  Until someone tells me, I’ll just keep whittling away at these papers.  Maybe I’ll even find some answers in this stack.  I’ll let you know.