You all must not work with kids very often, is all I can say--or at least with kids who have gotten basic information mixed up over the years. Or with kids who at times have trouble with auditory processing.

For the record, the fact that this work is wonderfully rewarding--that a teenaged student who had detested English in previous years was willing to stay after school on a Friday afternoon--remember your own Friday afternoons in high school?--was terrific. And that he'd remembered to come by my classroom for two Fridays in a row! Wow!

So, we looked at maps and books together--and wrote a lot--and talked a lot about words in the language...differences between prepositions and their objects, for instance. This was a step-by-step procedure with several steps backwards. For instance, we worked the classic exercise where you draw a cloud and then think of words that would fit this construction:

The bird flew ____________ + the cloud.

The bird flew ____________ + the clouds.

It doesn't work for every preposition, such 'according to' and 'aside from', but it works for most of the hundred I use on our working list. Every now and then my student would say something like, "The clouds went over the sky." And I knew he'd lost focus on putting clouds as the object of the preposition. But, by and large, most of his reponses filled in the formula well--and he went on to replace either 'the cloud' or 'the clouds' with either 'it' or 'them'. You might think that this sounds terribly dry, but it wasn't because I was witnessing the joy on his face as he realized really important things, such as when we plugged in objective case pronouns as objects of prepositions, he said, "It sounds wrong to say 'about I'"--and I thought, 'Hallelujah!'

Anyway, at the end of a very long session when I had him list those eight parts of speech and, although he nailed most of them, he said 'suburb' and 'ejaculation', it just cracked me up. And I cracked him up when I cracked up. We're on the right path here, and, no, I wouldn't have gone into various definitions of ejaculation with a student. Quite improper.