The Walkers

Kaiya ditched me in her room this morning and shut the door. Not a minute later I heard water running and found her in the bathroom. Yes, she had climbed up onto the counter, into the sink, retreived her toothbrush and toothpaste, and proceeded to brush her teeth. She actually turned the water off before I snapped the picture, whining that her jammies were "messy".

I feel a little guilty about my English teacher preachiness for a few reasons. 1) I break grammar rules all the time. I overuse parentheses, ellipses, and sentence fragments. I like to make up my own words (like preachiness). I tend to throw in commas wherever I feel like it, even though I know the rules. And I like to start sentences with conjunctions. 2) I feel like I have made people too self-conscious about their blog posts and comments. 3) I know that my rants just come off as annoying. Here's the thing... I have accepted the fact (well, I'm trying to accept the fact) that certain rules don't seem to matter when it comes to electronic communications. Most people won't care about the nit-picky stuff in an email or on Facebook. And honestly, it's not stuff like that that keeps me awake at night. I promise. I'm much more bothered by the countless store signs, billboards, and local newspapers containing blatant errors. (Hire a copy editor!!) In other words, ple...

I've been in meetings all week with the other sophomore English teachers at my school, aligning our curriculum and creating some common assessments for the upcoming year. I know, it sounds boring, but it was actually really beneficial. I'm excited and grateful that we'll all be on the same page (for once). And those crazy kids can't complain about so-and-so being easier or harder than so-and-so. The suckers will never know what hit them. Mwahaahaa. Anyway, our conversation lead to common errors that we see in students' writing. But here's the thing - I don't just see these mistakes in my students' writing; I see them everywhere!! We narrowed it down to a list of 20 of the most glaring errors (most of them homophones) that adults have no excuse for making. And because I assume you care, I'm sharing the first five quick and dirty lessons with you. Its is possessive. It's is a contraction. The dragon opened its legs; apparently it's a hermaphrod...