Grammar's House

Every time I drive through Watertown, I have to laugh at the huge banner on the lawn of one business. "SPA'S HERE," it proclaims. It confounds me every single time I see it. Do the owners mean that they have one spa to sell, and it has just arrived? Spa is here? It seems to me that we've become far too liberal in our sprinkling of the apostrophes. They're popping up in the oddest places, aren't they?

I had to link to this post: http://www.banterist.com/archivefiles/000382.html. It made me laugh out loud, and at 5:36 in the morning, that is quite a feat. I have toyed with a similar idea of turning my students into Grammar Police -- asking them to take pictures or bring in copy of grievous grammar gaffes, and posting the evidence on a bulletin board. I thought it would be fun for them to realize how often the rules are flouted, and to catch adults making the same mistakes they make.

After sitting through a curriculum planning session, I'm tempted to change my mind. Reason? Well, I'm 99% sure that said students would catch ME. I listened to one of our veteran teachers review all the rules -- the prepositional, the adverbial, the pronounial, etc. -- and I understood at that moment that I do NOT have a good handle on the subject of usage. I can analyze Faulkner until the cows come home, but I'm at a loss to understand commas. I put semi-colons in when periods would do. I shamelessly dangle my modifiers. I don't make many mistakes with apostrophes, and I do know the difference between "to, two, and too," or "there, their, and they're," but I'm a hack when it comes to other stuff. Oh, you know... the stuff good English teachers just know.

I will be teaching grammar, and I may do it in stand-alone lessons because I think it is so important. I hope the kids never figure out that I'm really doing it because I need the info.

Of course, I'm just the type of teacher who would tell them that.