ESL Moment of the....Last 3 months, I guess

Umm, sorry to everyone about my delinquency in posting. Life's been...pretty good I suppose. I find myself depriving myself of sleep fairly regularly, and then once in a while, like today, I end up taking a nap over 3 hours long to accommodate my funny sleep patterns. But that's whatever. Life is good. I'm pretty big on the teaching aspect to my life, pretty big on the social/community aspect, and that makes everything better than last year.

The impetus to drive me out of my blog reverie is the somewhat ridiculousness of the annual spelling bee. Don't get me wrong; I love spelling bees. I pride myself on my spelling, and any opportunity to show that off is fantastic. Last week I held spelling bees in each of my classes, and the top students in each class will face off soon to determine representatives for IST in each grade in the local bilingual school association bee. I was given a list of words to read from with sentences that accompany each word - no definition provided, which I feel should always be available for the spellers so they can more effectively determine word roots and the like, but that's beside the point. These lists were apparently compiled a number of years ago through a collaboration of the various schools involved - each school, for each grade level, provided a number of words and sentences. The hilarity is found in some of these sentences, which (no offense intended to any of my students who I know are reading this) read like they were written by some of my students - getting the implied definition of the word wrong, phrasing things like they would be in Spanish, and especially using words as the wrong part of speech, which is the most typical and blatant error in the following sentences that I've compiled below, straight from my word list:

commune - He is really commune in the way he talks.
dapper - Jennifer went so dapper to the party. (yesterday) [editor's note: All sentences shown as they appear on my paper.]
crabbed - He has a crabbed handwriting.
culprit - The judge culprit him for assassination.
docket - We docket the document.
credence - Their credence in the god Helios did not dissuade them from eating the cattle.
chronic - The diabetes is a chronic disease. [editor's note: It is common in Spanish to use many definite articles.]
daunt - With his words he's only trying to make you daunt.
calamity - Loosing our homes was a great calamity to us all.
complacent - He had become a complacent after years of success.
acquisition - I just got a new acquisition, I bought a new CD. [Comma splice.]
mystifying - She has a mystifying behavior. [This one just seems lazy.]
amply - That is an amply quantity, is more than enough. [THREE things wrong here!]
garrulous - He is to garrulous and she is extremely quiet.
profiteer - The food seller profiteer his clients. [I think of profiteer mostly as a noun - a person - and while it certainly can be a verb, it should be conjugated correctly!]
flambeau - The president during the football tournament flambeau the torch. [Noun being "verbed," fake verb in the wrong form, and we have a misplaced modifier/comma issue - apparently he was just the president for the time frame of the tournament!]
cohesion - The seniors did cohesion on the party.
discounting - We were discounting the candies we ate. [D'you mean counting backwards?]
cynical - Alejandro is so cynical, he only thinks of himself.
veritable - He is a veritable person. [Okay, veritable kinda means "genuine," but sometimes synonyms aren't synonyms for every sense of the other word.]
conciliate - Judd offered conciliate the argument.
gossamer - The store sold gossamer for his clients. [A store itself (himself?) doesn't do any selling, and where can you buy spider web material?]
feign - he is being feign in his reaction, he really is disappointed.
facilitate - The math teacher facilitate us the things by giving us a study guide. [Good try in using an indirect object, but it doesn't work here, really. And what "things?" Can you specify?]
susceptible - The sound of water against the ship was barely susceptible. [I wouldn't think of attacking the sound of water!]
anachronism - It would be an anachronism if you include electricity in a play about the [...thousands of years before electricity was invented?]
consternation - I feel a great consternation about the note in the science class.
picturesque - We took a picturesque picture yesterday. [No real grammatical/usage errors, but really?]

Now, it's worth noting that this doesn't amount to a great proportion of the sentences provided - there were nearly 4 single-spaced pages of words - but I couldn't help but crack up when I read some of these, and I carried my list around for a couple of days, reading sentences to any other teacher who would listen, making them crack up too.

Hopefully I won't wait three more months for my next post. That would take me much too close to the end of the year.