Clever girl.

I just wanted to present a short follow up to my last post, regarding my first day in Grade Eight. It went a little something like this:
1. "Are you our teacher today, or someone's Mom?" "I'm neither. I'm an intern." "Can we call you Mrs. Student Intern?" "No, that's degrading, you can call me Miss Crimmins." "So you're not married?" "No, are you?" "No." "Good, we're both too young for that kind of thing."

Sigh. Chuckle.

2. "Do you know what the capitol of Russia is?" "Um..." (I am completely blanking out here and all I can think are the words, 'Soviet Union!' WTF?) "No. I don't know. I mean....I know, of COURSE I know! But I really think you should take the time to look it up in the Atlas on the shelf. Capitol cities have stars by them."

Phewf. Chuckle. Shame. It's MOSCOW!!!! As soon as I stepped away I remembered!

3. "And a sentence fragment is.....well....it's an incomplete sentence." "What's an incomplete sentence?" "Like..a sentence that lacks fullness. Heh. I mean...it lacks a clear subject. It might have a verb, but lacks a subject." "Can you give an example of that, I don't get it." "Yes, of course. Um... (I turn to the board and start to really sweat) How about, 'Let's go.' See, there is no subject...'go' is the verb, but there is no one for the 'go' to refer to." "But isn't 'let's' short for 'let us'? So let us go would be a full sentence because 'us' is the subject" (At this point I am really turned around and I still feel like it should be wrong but I cant figure out why either way. I chose the worst possible example. Surely 'let's go' doesn't stand alone as it's own sentence unless some pathetic author made a mistake. I try to picture myself leaving it as it's own sentence in a paper, and it feels wrong, but somehow, the logic sounded right.) "Well, why don't we take a vote.'

Seriously? I am still embarrassed about this one.

--- So, I have some reading to do. I have resolved to hit a bookstore this weekend and get a basic grammar book to relearn all the rules, all the definitions, and all the examples, and then make a strong comeback with the kids. I'm also going to look back over all of my blogs and count how many sentence fragments there are. I'm sure the number will be astounding.

xox