Weird Stuff My Students Have Written
I’ve been meaning for a while to write something collecting the funny or just strange things my students have written. But I don’t have all my notes here, so I’ll tell y’all about a couple that came up today.
The first one is from the end of last year (that being last March.) The first-years (7th-graders) were doing short writing assignments. At the top, they had to write the date (and they wrote it out, including writing things like “twenty-first”) and the day of the week. So one kid who was trying very hard but wasn’t very good at spelling wrote:
Mach Seven Flyday
When I read it, it seemed so natural that I didn’t initially notice the error. I was all like “Sure, today’s the day for flying at mach 7. What could be incorrect about that?”
Today I was correcting tests and came across this sentence on the papers of several 3rd-year (9th-grader) students. BTW, 3rd-years really shouldn’t be making errors like this.
We are afraid of that bog.
So, can you guess what’s wrong with the sentence? It seems pretty good, right? A bog is a reasonable and enticingly mysterious thing to be afraid of, right? Well, it’s fine unless the correct answer is (and I know anyone who’s taught English in Japan already knows what I’m about to say) “We are afraid of this dog.” The astute reader will note that these students also managed to consistently screw up “this” vs. “that.” As often happens, I initially thought the above sentence was fine because it reads like natural English. That’s why I’m not always the best person to grade assignments.