As I waded through rubbish on Facebook this morning, putting off another assignment, I was puzzled by the amount of people wishing others 'Happy VD'. What a strange thing to be happy about, I thought. Perhaps it was to do with the release of the 50 Shades of Grey film? (And, no, I won't be watching it. Come on, you should know me better than that by now...). Of course, as my coffee started to work, I realised such posts were by people too lazy or too bad at spelling to write 'Valentine's Day.' 'And Merry STD to you, too,' I was tempted to type, but was too much of a coward.
I have started to write my new assignment, as it's due in by midday on Thursday. That's to say, I have opened a Word document. There it is, minimised at the bottom of my screen, occasionally calling out, 'Excuse me!' and being ignored in favour of... everything else. I have a pile of books and journal articles in front of me, which shows everyone my obvious eagerness to get writing. One is a book that arrived this morning (look, it's the half-term holiday this week; I have plenty of time to do this. She says.). The book's called Kissed by a Fox and is honestly about animism, although the title may have taken your imagination briefly along another path. When I looked up the title on Google Images, so I could include a photo on here, my computer started sweating unpleasantly; I have decided to use something grammar-related and far less interesting.
That leads very clumsily to the grammar course which 3 of us went to this week. I've not mentioned Mrs GSOH for a while, but she now works at the school every morning and lunch-time, adding her little touches of insanity to the place. Anyway, she came with one of the reception-class TAs and me to be updated on grammar-lesson changes to the National Curriculum. Now, I love writing, and can hopefully write coherently most of the time, but I don't always know what the different bits of writing are called. When we got to the course, we started looking through the handouts that had been left on the table. One was a glossary. Cohesive devices...? Was that to do with grammar? We started wondering if we were on the right course. Maybe this was car maintenance, because that sounded like a kind of spanner. Fronted adverbials...? Perhaps this was biology. Passive, possessive, being stressed and subordinate?? What had we got ourselves into?
The tutor arrived before we could escape. 'Every school has a grammar snob,' she began, and the three of us looked at each other and nodded, while knowing it definitely wasn't one of us, because we had never heard of modal verbs. Anyway, we muddled our way through, and nodded sagely at all of the slides on her power-point. The coffee break was spent eating biscuits and worriedly sharing our lack of knowledge. 'I know semi-colons,' I said, relieved that I understood something, 'because we did them last week with the year 6s.' 'That's good,' replied Mrs GSOH, who then pointed out that I had chocolate on my face. Bloody hell - why can't I go somewhere and at least look intelligent?
So, what did we get out of the course? There is now no such thing as a 'complex' sentence, apparently. And this is because 'simple' sentences can be very complex (like grammar courses). We now have to talk about how many clauses the sentence has. And 'connectives' are now known as 'conjunctions'. We learnt that little children are very good at using passive sentences to get themselves out of trouble. I learnt that I know very little about grammar, and must take more care when eating.
I have started to write my new assignment, as it's due in by midday on Thursday. That's to say, I have opened a Word document. There it is, minimised at the bottom of my screen, occasionally calling out, 'Excuse me!' and being ignored in favour of... everything else. I have a pile of books and journal articles in front of me, which shows everyone my obvious eagerness to get writing. One is a book that arrived this morning (look, it's the half-term holiday this week; I have plenty of time to do this. She says.). The book's called Kissed by a Fox and is honestly about animism, although the title may have taken your imagination briefly along another path. When I looked up the title on Google Images, so I could include a photo on here, my computer started sweating unpleasantly; I have decided to use something grammar-related and far less interesting.
That leads very clumsily to the grammar course which 3 of us went to this week. I've not mentioned Mrs GSOH for a while, but she now works at the school every morning and lunch-time, adding her little touches of insanity to the place. Anyway, she came with one of the reception-class TAs and me to be updated on grammar-lesson changes to the National Curriculum. Now, I love writing, and can hopefully write coherently most of the time, but I don't always know what the different bits of writing are called. When we got to the course, we started looking through the handouts that had been left on the table. One was a glossary. Cohesive devices...? Was that to do with grammar? We started wondering if we were on the right course. Maybe this was car maintenance, because that sounded like a kind of spanner. Fronted adverbials...? Perhaps this was biology. Passive, possessive, being stressed and subordinate?? What had we got ourselves into?
The tutor arrived before we could escape. 'Every school has a grammar snob,' she began, and the three of us looked at each other and nodded, while knowing it definitely wasn't one of us, because we had never heard of modal verbs. Anyway, we muddled our way through, and nodded sagely at all of the slides on her power-point. The coffee break was spent eating biscuits and worriedly sharing our lack of knowledge. 'I know semi-colons,' I said, relieved that I understood something, 'because we did them last week with the year 6s.' 'That's good,' replied Mrs GSOH, who then pointed out that I had chocolate on my face. Bloody hell - why can't I go somewhere and at least look intelligent?
So, what did we get out of the course? There is now no such thing as a 'complex' sentence, apparently. And this is because 'simple' sentences can be very complex (like grammar courses). We now have to talk about how many clauses the sentence has. And 'connectives' are now known as 'conjunctions'. We learnt that little children are very good at using passive sentences to get themselves out of trouble. I learnt that I know very little about grammar, and must take more care when eating.
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