amazing

My kids are amazing and they deserve a far better teacher than I have been lately.

We have been mired in the down and dirty world of grammar (yuck and double-yuck). Today we started participles. I explained. They nodded. They took notes. They completed exercises. We checked them. Yawn.

The amazing part? No one slept, no one whined or complained, and everyone stayed on task in spite of the mind-numbing tedium of it all. They deserve better than me.

I did make an attempt at levity in my last class, but it didn't go too far. I told them verbals might be considered the drag queens of the grammar world--they want to be nouns, adjectives and adverbs, they act and dress like them, but at the end of the day, they're just verbs pretending to be something they're not. One kid cautiously raised his hand and asked, "Are you saying that verbals are cross-dressers?"

Yep, that's what I'm saying.