Eats, Shoots, and Leaves...and other errors

You wouldn't know it from my (lack of) posting, but my school year is off to a great start. Finally, in my fifth year of teaching, I actually sort of feel like I know what I'm doing. Knock on wood. I keep waiting for the ceiling to fall in on me. Nonetheless, it is a great feeling. I am enjoying the beginning of the school year more than I ever have.

Today, however, I handed out a paper to my first hour class, only to realize that it had a mechanical error in the first line. For those of you grammar freaks out there, beware. This might make you sick: I used an apostrophe in the word students (student's), but it wasn't possessive. I keep trying to find excuses: maybe I had written it one way and then changed the wording but forgot to take out the apostrophe? I know, lame. It's just inexcusable.

I can live with a typo here and there (although I do try to be careful to proofread my work before making copies--it comes with the territory of teaching English), but I am not a fan AT ALL of misplaced and overused apostrophes. Especially when the mistake is mine and I have already made 130 copies to hand out to every single one of my students in every single one of my classes. It's one of those papers that I pray they won't take home to show their parents.

But, as I told my students, I hate wasting paper more than I hate grammar and mechanical errors, so I will not give in to my urge to correct the error and print off another 130 copies. Instead, I made it into a teachable moment. I asked all my classes look for the errors on the paper and correct them. It took awhile, and a few hints, but a kid in each class finally found it. I told them that it's a good reminder that even English teachers make mistakes---however rare it may be ;)

Oh, and by the way, the title of this entry is a reference to a book (Eats, Shoots, and Leaves) that is very entertaining, for all you linguistically obsessive folks. I would highly recommend it and even have a copy you can borrow if you are interested! The book's title comes from a real live dictionary definition of a panda who "eats, shoots, and leaves" rather than one who "eats shoots and leaves." Ah the power of a comma!