Teaching English

I recently had the pleasure of meeting a very entertaining lecturer who was a great relayer of anecdotes, some of which were about her days as a primary teacher. She had various pet hates in pupil's literacy.

One was poor knowledge of punctuation. She talked about semi colons quite a lot. I was ashamed to admit that I haven't got a clue when or how to use a semi colon. I hope to learn this when I do my degree.

The other thing was when to use 'that or which'; a good question. When I was writing my book, the computer always underlined my 'which's' and seemed much more contented when I changed them to 'that's', but I just assumed this was an American vs British thing. Nine times out of ten, I stuck to my guns and ignored the green line glaring at me accusingly.

Too many adjectives was another no no. I agree with her there, though if you read enough Year 1 stories, you tend to rejoice at an adjective. 'I went on a spaceship with my friend Tom and Lucy and William and Rosa and we went to the moon and we saw some aliens and we made friends and we went home'. You get the idea. There's only so many of those you can take.

She despaired of teachers' attempts to try to get children away from using the word 'said' ad infinitum, and introduce them to more interesting words. I blushed again, remembering the big poster I put up in one of my Year 6 classes, which encouraged such things as: chortled, cackled, grunted, pleaded..... I think as a group we totted up about thirty.

She had been marking a child's story and came upon his attempt to do what his teacher had obviously taught him. Good lad.

It went something like this: 'Whatever you do, don't go into that cave' he ejaculated.

You have to admire him for trying.

I have my own supply teacher story of a gaffe which gave us hours of pleasure.

The brief was to write a letter to a favourite character, be it film or book. This was a very polite Year 3 child. Predictably, given the Star Wars obsession of the time, he wrote to 'Darf Vada'.

He extolled everything about Darf Vada. Whilst the spelling was clearly original, it was decipherable, until I came upon this bit of sentence: 'I likd your cok....' Now, I am sure he did not mean this literally, but I simply could not translate it. I realised he was trying to spell 'liked' rather than 'licked', which was my first guess and the cause of an uncontrollable onrush of giggling. Whichever he meant, the result was equally funny.

My children were all grown up and not being a Trekky, I was stumped. Jenny, my trusty teaching assistant, who had three young boys, had no such problems.

'Of course', she enthused, 'he meant to say': "I like your cloak".

Honestly, silly me.

By the way, I hope you noted my brave use of a semi colon.