Things You Say That Irritate Language Nerds: Part I

I am, as I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before, a high school English teacher. As such, I have a greater-than-average awareness of language, punctuation, and correct word choice. And although I try not to be an utter grammar Nazi about it, there are some things people say that are so blatantly incorrect that it makes me want to slap them with a cold fish.

This will undoubtedly be a series.

Today’s episode: “You have two choices…”

I hear this all the time. On TV. In the movies. Around the halls of my school. And frequently said by people who are, in fact, very intelligent. Despite this, they go forth with this horribly incorrect phrase.

• “You have two choices… live or die.”
• “You have two choices… study hard and pass, or slack off and fail.”
• “You have two choices… chocolate with Bavarian Cream or the engine block of a 1972 Studebaker.”

In all of these situations, the person being spoken to is told he must make two choices. But he doesn’t. He has one choice. He has two options. If a person is being told he must choose between life or death, there is only that one choice — life or death. The choice is the action — the single action, mind you — of selecting between the available options. This is true no matter how many options a person has.

• “You have six choices… life, death, a guided tour of the Wonka chocolate factory, electrolysis for that thing on your lip, a package of AAA batteries and a partridge in a pear tree.”

This person still only has one choice to make, because he is being given the option of choosing between these six items. Also, the person giving him this option is either patently insane or the host of the strangest version of Let’s Make a Deal in history. Which I admit may be the same thing.

Here’s a case where a person actually has two choices:

• “You have two choices… save the baby’s life or allow him to grow up to be Hitler. Also, do you want fries with that?”

In this situation, the person being presented with the choice has two decisions to make. Will he allow an innocent baby to die even knowing he will eventually become history’s greatest monster? Plus — hey, fries? These are the sorts of moral implications that can weigh on a person for the rest of his life, especially if you start to consider such vital factors as “curly,” “battered,” or “cajun-style.”

But these four options come with two choices, not four, as some people will undoubtedly say.

Here’s an easy way to remember. When facing the situation, ask yourself how many decisions a person has to make. “Cake or pie” is one decision, which means one choice, which really means no choice because pie almost always wins. Unless it’s ice cream cake.

To summarize:

• The number of choices is equal to the number of decisions, not the number of options.
• Increasing the number of options has no effect on the number of choices that must be made.
• Pie always trumps non-ice cream cake.

Students ahoy!

The first two days of a new school year are a snap. This is largely because the students haven’t arrived yet. Mine come back tomorrow.

(Yes, on a Friday. No, I don’t know why.)

But I’m feeling good. This year, for the first time, the only course I’ll be teaching will be English III (alias American Literature), with half of my classes being set aside for honors students. I’m excited about this. I won’t lie to you — nobody (teacher or student) is ever happy to get back to work after a blissful summer off, but I feel more optimistic about this year than I have many years past.

Please don’t burst my bubble. I’m still blowing it up.

Approaching summer’s end…

It’s been a lovely summer, friends, but it’s sadly almost over. For me, at least — school in Louisiana starts terribly early in August, and my vacation is rapidly drawing to a close.

So let me just give a little pre-school year advice to all the students out there who will be returning to the hallowed halls of learning, be it next week or next month or whenever. Remember: the teacher is not your enemy. The teacher is there to help you, to guide you, to aid you in accumulating knowledge.

We, the teachers, are not out to get you. We honestly are never happier than when we realize a student truly understands what we’re trying to teach you. It doesn’t benefit us at all if you fail — in fact, it makes our lives more difficult in numerous ways — from accounting for our grade distribution to the simple mathematical fact that it’s easier to average a bunch of 100s than it is a bunch of 26s in our gradebook.

We would like to be your friend, if possible, but you have to remember that’s not our job. We’re here — first and foremost — to teach you and the other people in the classroom with you. And while we’ll bend over backward to help any student that honestly wants to learn, likewise, we quickly lose respect for those students whose only goal seems to be disrupting the learning of others.

And yes, teachers are human beings. Sometimes, human beings have personality clashes. Sometimes they just don’t get along. But a good teacher is going to be professional enough to not let that interfere in the classroom. Remember: we’re not your enemy. We’re not there to destroy you or crush your dreams.

Do us a favor. Treat us the same way.

My fellow teachers…

I know that the song in the following YouTube video was written for the kids, but I think it behooves us to make this our anthem for the next two months as well. Whenever somebody asks me what I’m doing this summer, I don’t even know where to start answering… ’cause I got plans. Lots of work, but potentially, lots of reward.

But most of all, as each day comes around, I’m going to try my best to make sure that in every single possible way, today is gonna be a great day.

Dear Graduating Class of 2011…

As so many of our high school students head out into the real world (or college) this month, I thought I might take a few minutes to offer just a tiny bit of advice. It’s actually a pretty simple concept, but one that seems to have escaped many (not all, but many) of our young people.

Get ready, because those of you who don’t know it already are about to learn that the world is not about you.

A lot of you have had it pretty easy, and that’s okay. You’ve been kids. Your parents were there to take care of you, your teachers had a personal investment in watching you succeed. And while I hope your parents will always be there for you, the rest of it is about to change.

Those of you going to college — you’re going to enter an environment where teachers have so many students to consider that the attention you got in high school is going to seem downright personal by comparison. You’ll also find that they don’t have as much sympathy as you’re used to either. They’re not going to remind you daily when the next test is, when your next paper is due, or how many chapters will be on the next quiz. If you get study guides at all, do not expect them to be verbatim copies of the questions you will see on the test, and don’t expect the questions on the test to even be phrased the same way. And heaven forbid if you think you’re going to get those questions in the same order. Your teachers will give you a syllabus on the first day with the test schedule already there. If they mention it in class after that, it’ll either be a cursory reminder or to tell you the schedule has changed. Studying and preparing is now 100 percent on you. And don’t expect the university to be so forgiving of someone who’s mysteriously sick on every test day.

Those of you going into the job market — some of you have had your hands held for 12 years. You’re used to teachers who will bend over backwards, beg and plead with you to get your work done, to push yourself, to do your best. That’s because the teacher’s job is to make you as good as you can be. But when you get your own job, the boss doesn’t care about that. The boss cares about whether or not you can benefit his company, and if you can’t, his job isn’t to reshape you (assuming you will even allow yourself to be reshaped). Those of you who habitually turn in half-finished tests because you didn’t feel like doing the rest of it, who miss school for days at a time and expect someone to catch you up on everything you missed while you were out, who don’t pay attention, don’t take notes, and don’t care what your performance scores are? There is a word for people with that attitude in the workplace: unemployed.

And finally, for all of you, a last word. You’re all about to experience things you have never gone through before, and some of them will be difficult. But don’t make the mistake of thinking no one has ever gone through them before. I promise you, unless there’s going to be a disease named after you there is no problem you can name that somebody out there — probably someone you know — hasn’t already gone through at some point or another. Money, grades, relationships, co-workers you don’t get along with, insurance woes, that mysterious spot on the carpet… all of it. Any time you or one of your friends has said the phrase “Nobody understands,” you have been flat-out wrong. You are NOT a special little snowflake. Somebody has been there before.

But don’t think of that as a bad thing. The fact that someone has been through it means that someone, somewhere, knows what you’re going through. And if you can find them (they’re probably closer than you think) and ask them the right way, they may even be able to help.

And if you think I’m full of crap, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s okay too. Because I was your age once and I remember thinking people giving me advice were full of crap. And then I went out and made a bunch of stupid mistakes because I was 18 and knew everything in the world, just like you. I just hope that someday, when you’re older and have a little perspective, you’ll be able to look back on this and say, simply, “Yep. I get it now.”

Conversations: About Edgar Allan Poe

I love teaching Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Fall of the House of Usher” to my 11th graders. I love Poe’s language, I love his magnificent skill at crafting the perfect mood for his story, I love the way Poe could create characters and stories that stick with you not just hours after your finish the story, but months and years later. But mostly, I love teaching this story because invariably (as happened today), my class winds up having some variation of the following conversation:

Me: What the narrator is implying here is that… well… the Usher Family Tree didn’t have a lot of branches on it.
Student 1: You mean they’re inbred?
Me: Yep.
Student 2: I bet that’s why he’s so sick all the time!
Me: Very good. If a person has a recessive gene, then has a child with somebody else who has the same gene, there’s a much greater chance that the gene will become dominant. That can cause all kinds of different, unwanted conditions and abnormalities. From a genetic viewpoint, that’s the problem with inbreeding.
Student 2: Are there other problems?
Me: Of course. There’s the cultural reason it’s a bad idea.
Student 1: What’s the cultural reason?
Me: It gives me the flaming heebie-jeebies.

Tutoring

Need tutoring, kids? It’s great — recognizing that you have a problem is the first step towards solving it. But since some of your teachers will be giving up their valuable time to give you this after-school boost, try to make their job a little easier. For example… bring your textbook! You can’t count on the teacher having your textbook in his or her classroom, especially if they don’t usually teach the course in which you need help. And even if they do teach the same course, if you aren’t in their class, it’s possible that their class is at a different point in the curriculum than yours. So it’s wonderfully helpful if you can correctly identify the chapter/story/assignment that you are currently studying in your own class. A good start in — oh… let’s use English as an example — would be the ability to correctly identify any of the following:

• The title of the story you are studying, or…
• The author of the story you are studying, or…
• The basic plot of the story you are studying, or…
• Failing that, maybe just know what grade you’re currently in.

Following these simple steps, tutoring can be a fun and beneficial experience for everybody! (Not a guarantee.)

Sittin’ at school…

We’ve got our Open House tonight here at school. When you change up classes in January, you’ve got a whole new group of parents to meet and introduce yourself to and hope that they won’t come after your scalp when little Susie fails three tests in a row because she hasn’t bothered to fill in any of the answers.

I’ve got a bit of a commute from home to work, so on nights like this one I don’t bother to drive home, sit around for an hour, and drive back. Instead I stay up here and try to get some work done. Knocked out some reviews, wrote a new scene for Tales of the Curtain. And now, with an hour left before Open House starts, I just wish I had DC Universe online installed on my work computer.

Nobody tell me what happens on Chuck tonight. I’m DVRing it.

What Your Teacher is Thinking II: Back to School

Back in May, I took you on a quick journey into the mind of a typical American teacher in those closing weeks of the semester. Tomorrow the spring semester will begin at the high school where I teach, and although I’m sure many parents and students are unaware of this, most teachers actually have to report to work prior to the return of the students. Especially in schools like mine, where the semester break brings with it a whole new set of classes, rosters, and responsibilities. Tomorrow is, for all intents and purposes, another First Day of School.

But today, as we took part in workshops about teaching writing and examined a new evaluation system, no doubt many teachers’ minds drifted once or twice. So today, we’re going to journey into the thoughts of a hypothetical teacher to see what he or she may have been thinking the day before the students come on back…

Is this meeting over yet? I’ve got to get in my classroom and finish getting ready… gotta take down the student work from last semester, print out my syllabus…es… syllabuses? Syllabi? Is the plural of syllabus “syllabi?” That sounds right, but I’m just not sure. Um. I shall print out a syllabus per incoming student. Yes. That is what I shall do. I’ll print out these documents, along with the pretest I always give on the first day. If these kids are in English III, they should be able to adequately explain what a plot is by now, right? Especially the ones that I taught already, back when I was still teaching English I. I wonder how many of those I’ll have to teach again. I wonder if they’ll pay attention this time. This is a tougher class, we’re not going to spend weeks picking apart the DiCaprio Romeo and Juliet.

DiCaprio was good in Inception, wasn’t he? I mean, I’m not the guy’s biggest fan, but he held that movie together. Chris Nolan is just a hell of a director, honestly. I wonder if Inception is on Netflix streaming yet. Probably not. Oooh, but I can watch that documentary about backstage at Walt Disney World again. That was cool.

We’ve been going over this writing technique for a long time. I mean a really long time. Is there anybody left in the faculty who doesn’t get it? Sure, I can see taking this long explaining it to the students, but — crap, what did he just say? Everybody else is writing something down. What’s the assignment? Geez, he’s looking over here… okay, just write something. Anything. Doesn’t matter. Shopping list — I need Scotch tape, glue, loose leaf paper, eggs… Hmm. Ms. Edison is reading what she wrote down… Ah. “How I teach writing to my class.” That’s easy enough, I–

Oh man, he’s pointing at me.

Ahem.

…

Okay, that was easy enough. Sounded like I knew what I was talking about. Whew, I haven’t had to pull something out of my butt like that since I was in college. Heh. Remember that class? Geology. Why on Earth was I taking geology? I remember why I wasn’t paying attention in geology, though. I mean, who was I kidding, I didn’t know a hole in the ground from the hole in my–

What are they passing out? Oh, this is my roster. These are the kids I’m going to have in my room tomorrow. Let’s see… never heard of him, of him, of her, of — aw no, not him again. That little jackass was in my class in ninth grade, isn’t it somebody else’s turn to deal with him? Never heard of her, of him of… what’s this? Thirty-two students? Thirty-two? And that’s the same as I have in my second period, too! I’ve only got thirty desks! And it’s not like I’ve exactly got room to put in more. What, should I get them to sit on each other’s laps? Man, I’m going to have to start going around until I find somebody who has extra desks, which nobody ever does. I feel like a Dickensian waif, knocking on doors asking for desks like that. Maybe I can dress up like that rabbit in the Muppet version and sing on their stoops until they throw desks at me.

This meeting still isn’t over.

Is there any Christmas candy left at home? There’s nothing sadder than when you eat the last of the Christmas candy. Even taking down the decorations. That’s like the final signal that the holidays are over and it’s time to get back to the grind. That and waking up at 5 a.m. so you can make it to work. Human beings should not be awake at that time. What’s up with those people who get up at 4 to jog? Okay, good for them for wanting to stay in shape, but what’s the point of living longer if you’ve got to wake up at 4 a.m. to do it?

Whew — meeting over. Gotta go get this class together before the kids show up tomorrow.

…

Syllabi. Almost sure of it.

Teachers! Play Parental Contact Bingo!

Parental contact is an important part of a teacher’s job. But after you’ve made a thousand calls, you start to hear the same things over and over. But there’s hope! Now you can spice up your calls home with a game of…

RULES:

1. At the beginning of each semester, each teacher starts with a blank card. Stamp each box as the teacher hears that particular comment from a parent.
2. Quotes need not be verbatim to count.
3. All gender-specific terms count if the opposite gender is invoked.