English is a fun subject.
If you don't remember it that way, then you've had the wrong teachers
and you have my sympathy. I could sleep
through English in high school and still pull A's and B's with little or no
effort whatsoever. I was lucky; I was a
strong writer; I was a master bullshitter.
Literature may not be the most exciting thing in the world -
Lord knows there's plenty of shit out there that makes me cringe, both new
stuff, old stuff, and ancient stuff. If
I have to read Plato's cave allegory one more time, I'm throwing the old fucker
into his own metaphysical fire pit; Romeo and Juliet is one of the most ironic
comedies I've ever read; Hemingway wrote dialogue as if we were all sitting
inside his warped mind with him; Emily Dickinson belonged in a mental institution
and most of her poems can be sung along to the tune of "Yellow Rose of
Texas" (try it - I'm not lying and almost got thrown out of a college-level
directed study because of it).
Writing, though, can be the most exciting thing in the
world. Language is fun, and fun with
language can be hysterical. You see,
there are certain things that, when said or written, can mean something
completely innocent one way and completely not another. For instance, the vacuum cleaner should suck
up dust bunnies, but the vacuum should not suck. Dante may have gone to Hell, but you can't
tell Dante to actually go to Hell, nor can you say, "Oh, hell, it's
Dante." You can say, "Look at the beaver
dam," but you cannot say, "Look at the damn beaver."
Recently the students completed reports about Egyptian pharaohs,
many of whom were mummified. The
students only needed to write the word "wrap" in some tense in their
papers to make one of their many points. However, some of them did not know that there
is a difference between "wrap" and "rap." Generally speaking, this is not a huge deal
because the mistake, though lazy, doesn't truly interfere with the cadence of
the speech nor the point if aural. For
example, "To wrap the mummy" and "to rap the mummy" sound
exactly the same -- homophones.
Throw in verb tenses, and it all falls apart. The social studies teacher approached me,
explaining that he had never seen so many pharaohs suffer such perversions and
that their poor mummified remains had been desecrated. He didn't understand, nor did I for that
matter, how so many children could get through elementary school without
learning how to change verb tenses properly, nor that short-vowel words ending
in consonants most often had those consonants repeated.
So I did a mini-lesson for my classes. I wrote the following words on the board -- WRAP
RAP RAP -- and continued to write
their verb counterparts as I went along.
Lesson time.
"Children, you may wrap
the mummy. You may be wrapping the mummy. You wrapped
the mummy. Maybe you play a knock-knock
joke on his head, so you rap the
mummy. You're rapping the mummy. You rapped the mummy."
Here is where I hesitated.
I looked to the students who know I am about to write the -ing and -ed
versions of the last word, but this time, I did not speak. I simply added -ing and -ed to the word. When I stepped away, the students saw the
words rap - raping - raped.
"These are very bad words," I told them. "If this happened to the mummy in your
paper, it is very, very, very bad. Chances
are your grade will also be very, very, very bad. Do we understand the importance now of
spell-check and then proofreading, also? Your computer may not have caught this, but
you should have."
Then I erased the board.
I am so going to Hell.
Damn. Sucks to be me.
