Tagged: Teaching

Practice What You Preach

In yesterday’s post, I came down hard on my fellow grammarians. A friend responded and said if he didn’t correct errors when he heard them, then how are people to learn? Point taken, but I have to consider whether this is done in the context of a classroom or a casual conversation. Students can expect marks in their papers pointing out grammar and sentence construction issues and a correction here or there in classroom discussions can help students. If someone needs help, they know who to go to, especially if these teachers or professors are in their lives. Correcting is a professional’s job.

In a casual conversation, correcting someone can be very alienating, unless they asked for it. Unsolicited advice is never a good idea and no one likes a know-it-all. Continue reading →

Set a Course For Earth

I wrote this post shortly after I lost the job with the worst boss ever. I was unemployed at the time, so I was prolifically blogging whenever I wasn’t sending out résumés and driving out to go to interviews. This was originally posted on ShindoTV in March 30, 2007.

An image that has been with me ever since I got fired from the mailroom job is that of a Starfleet captain telling the helmsman, “Set a course for Earth.” Of course, I have seen way too many Star Trek episodes in my life, but this generic scenario meant to me returning to self and coming up with a plan for the future, which is what I have been doing for the past few months. Continue reading →

E-Mail and The Ideal Husband

This morning, I woke up thinking about the student who sent me an e-mail yesterday at 3:30 pm about trying to catch me at 4:30 pm about something class related, only to get a second one after 6:00 pm where she was a bit frustrated for me not getting back to her. I saw all these e-mails some time after 7:00 pm, when I was catching up with my e-mails of the day.

For some odd reason, while I was thinking about the difference between expectactions of a reply and how often people actually check their e-mail, my groggy mind transitioned to flashbacks of the late 90′s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Ideal Husband, where paper notecards go back and forth between characters at lightening speed, made possible by couriers on foot in London. Somehow, these couriers managed to swiftly get their notes to their intended recipients on time. I have always suspected the screen writer was thinking about e-mail and how to Victorianize it for this film, while real e-mail at the time was the less convenient telegram office. Continue reading →

Future Perfect, Past Unreal Conditional

This was originally posted in ShindoTV on July 27, 2010. Here, I give a lesson in grammar and apply it to living, which we don’t always think of, despite our verb tenses reflecting our outlooks on life.

In the future, everything will be perfect, right? That’s not how the future perfect works. Yesterday, I had a difficult time trying to explain this verb tense construction to my students at the language school. All I knew was that I would liked to have liked to have explained this without a hitch.

It’s a verb tense that’s used all the time by native speakers of English. There’s a goal, an expectation, some kind of deadline to meet implied. Here is the basic construction:

Subject + will + have + past participle
Example: Tomorrow, I will have completed all my paperwork.

Subject + be (am/is/are) + going to + have + past participle
Example: I am going to be finished with my project tomorrow.

Continue reading →