...working with dangling modifiers

Dangling and misplaced modifers can be a really funny grammar topic to cover, because of the inherent humor of confusion. For those of you who don't know what I mean by dangling and misplaced modifiers, allow me to give you an example:

Sam screamed at the barking dog in his underwear.

The phrase "in his underwear" is the misplaced modifier here. Is Sam wearing underwear? Is the dog wearing Sam's underwear? Is the dog inside Sam's underwear AS Sam's wearing it? It's hilarious. You can have some real fun drawing misplaced and dangling modifiers in class to understand just how they can be misunderstood. "I saw the beautiful couch peeking through the window." Who's peeking? The couch? These sentences need to be rewritten to clarify their meanings.

We covered this this quarter in my class. It appeared on the exam my students took yesterday. Sam and his dog even appeared. Some kids figured out how to fix it: "Sam, in his underwear, screamed at the barking dog." Some kids just haven't gotten this concept yet: " Sam the barking dog in his underwear screamed." Some kids have been clueless all year, in more ways than just this: "San scraned at the dog en his undewer." (I teach 11th graders, remember.) One girl fixed it, made the meaning clear, but it wasn't the meaning I was expecting:

"Sam screamed because he has a barking dog in his underwear."

Full marks.

Edit: Another gem: the sentence to be corrected read, "William nearly earned 1000 lempiras when he sold his paintings." "Nearly earned" indicates that he came close to earning money, but he did not earn money. "Earned nearly" means he earned perhaps 990 lempiras, and is the correction I was looking for. This bright girl REALLY switched things up, but unfortunately didn't make the necessary correction:

"When William sold his pants, he nearly earned 100 lempiras."

...as a bubbling puddle of melted flesh and skin

It reached 97 degrees inside my classroom today. I finally took a thermometer so I could know EXACTLY how ungodly hot it is. Just knowing it's ungodly is not enough. I needed to know exactly. This is completely ridiculous. I was as warm as I care to be by the time I got on the bus in the morning. It was 80 degrees before 8 o'clock.

Not only is the heat unbearable, but it's fairly unreasonable to expect students to absorb lessons on allegories and dangling modifiers when they're more focused on avoiding heat stroke.

The rest of this week is all half days for quarter exams, and then there's one full week before Holy Week, which is a full week off. Once we return from Holy Week, our days will be shortened. we get out of school at 1:30, at which point today my room was only around 93 degrees. Beautiful.

I cannot function. It's simply too hot. This is awful.

...wishing forced happy birthdays

This post was first written and published in March (I believe) of 2010. I was pressured by administration to remove it in 2012.  5 years later, the underlying feelings still exist, and so I'm reuploading it since I have nothing to worry about from administrative pressures nor does anyone read this blog any more.  It remains one of my favorite posts I've written for this blog.
 
Doña Berta is International School's matriarch. She founded the school and is the superintendent. Today I received this e-mail from my principal (Doña Berta's daughter-in-law):

"Today is Doña Berta's birthday. Her email is ____________ if you want to send her a note."

O...K? I don't think I've explained the family-business, kiss-the-ring mentality that really pervades the atmosphere of this school, making me view this message as much more comical than my readers might. Allow me to clarify: IST IS indeed a family business. Doña Berta founded the school, her architect husband designed the buildings, and her children and in-laws populate the upper echelons of the school hierarchy. IST, while a private, Christian institution, is also a FOR-PROFIT school, at the same time as being one of the most expensive schools in the country, (I might add that teachers here make around 500 dollars a month). Admittedly, it's also one of the best schools in the country (a fact that frightens me so much about the quality of education in this country, but that is another post altogether), but the sheer amount of revenue coming in from tuition for the over 1000 students here simply must outweigh the amount paid to us teachers and the even lower-paid cleaning women and maintenance men. I have not seen Doña Berta's house, but I hear it is breathtaking.

Now, I know that teachers aren't renowned for the size of their paychecks, even more in a third-world country, and that as someone who created the institution, Doña Berta deserves to enjoy some dividends. But Doña Berta has not even been around the school since Christmas - she's spent almost the entire time in Miami. Again, there are familial things I know nothing of going on, but still, no superintendent would take two and a half months away from their post in any school system I'd met before this year. And yet there's this sense of reverence around Doña Berta which I don't understand. With focus on family-first staffing, making money rather than ensuring increasing quality of education (family members are not always the most qualified to develop curriculum or whatever else they do in their air-conditioned offices all day), I as a teacher feel very lost in the shuffle.

So I won't be sending any birthday greetings today.

...finally realizing an easy way to get photos up here

Sheesh. Took me long enough. Anything I load onto facebook has a URL I can link to. I'll have to share more pictures soon.

...making juice of lemon.

A quote from a one page paper:

"If life gives you lemon, make of them juice of lemon."

Right on.