I dread the first day of a new class where the teacher makes us go around and say our names and tell the class a little bit about ourselves. As a teacher, I realize the purpose of this exercise. I just hate it when I'm on the student side. Mostly because when the teacher finds out that I teach English at a university, they get this sort of panicky look on their face which I know means that they're going back over (in their mind) the presentation they've prepared for the class to try and remember if they've grammar checked it. I find myself longing to say, "Don't worry, I'm not the grammar police." Up to now, I've haven't even been tempted to correct anyone's grammar.
But that was before I had class on Monday. The teacher is a little pompous to begin with - she insists that we all address her as "Professor" - which is her right, don't get me wrong. But who does that? Every other teacher I've had at Loyola, lawyer or not, has us call them by their first name. But as I said, whatever - I could live with that.
Then she pulled up a PowerPoint presentation riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. When she saw them (I gritted my teeth and didn't say a word), she said, "Oh, these slides came prepared. They're from the book." Uh...I doubt it. And if that's true, I want my money back on this book. For real. Because it would make the editors morons.
I don't know how long I'm going to last before I snap and scream, "It's YOU'RE not YOUR. It's a contraction of YOU ARE, you idiot!"
This could be bad.
4 comments:
This is weird...and I'm not an English major/professor, (nowhere near!) but I can't stand grammatical (or spelling) errors, either....it makes me want to slap the error-maker and say, 'Did you sleep all the way through elementary school, or just through English class?'
I myself have been know to "correct & return" everything from Birthday cards to love letters (sorry hubby!!) One of my favorite books is "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" - I happen to mis-use (intentionally) the semi-colon; but I have my contractions & homonyms DOWN!! YOU GO GIRL!!!
yeah... they probably slept through school. i am thinking of installing some sort of alarm to go off every 5 minutes in my classroom to wake the children up. and I'M (i.e.: I am) NOT EVEN BORING!
a personal favorite grammer error of mine is the whole there, their, they're debacle. whoever thought that was a good idea??
and while i'm at it...i hate silent E's. how rude!
Another one of my (many!) pet peeves is people using affect and effect as if they're interchangeable...there is a difference, people!! FYI: Effect is a noun, affect is a verb!
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