I was a little glum after work today, down with a case of the New Prep Blues, but dinner with my family made me laugh until my sides hurt and now I am feeling more optimistic.
Stella's language arts class is being taught, suboptimally, by a guy who does not normally teach language arts. Social studies is his usual purview, and apparently it has been a bit of a scramble for him to get the language arts content student-ready. He was having them correct ungrammatical sentences today in class, as in "He took a picture of Margaret and I." Stella was happy to tell him that the correct version would be "He took a picture of Margaret and me."
"No," he told her, "you should say, 'He took a picture of me and Margaret.'"
WELL, said the Gladly family collectively, is THAT what he said?!
I cannot remember if I have told you about Pete's newfound fascination with language. Have I already told you about this? He used to think he wanted to be a botanist and then he decided he wanted to study linguistics instead. And sure, your children are not your children, seek not to make them like you, Kahlil Gibran blah blah blah, but YOU GUYS, it's SO FUN having a kid who geeks out about language.
So Pete chimed in. It's so frustrating, he said, when language arts teachers don't understand grammatical rules. He said he was just waiting for his writing teacher to tell them to avoid passive voice, which he would take as a prompt to submit an essay entirely written in passive voice.
"That choice would not be approved by your teacher!" I said, and we were off to the races, laughing our way through an entirely passive voice dinner conversation.
I am guessing that some of you may be a little vague about exactly what passive voice is, so here is a refresher if you need one: in passive voice, the subject of the sentence is not the agent of the action. Instead of "the agent verbs the object," you have "the object is verbed by the agent." Sometimes it's precisely what you need because you don't know, or perhaps don't wish to acknowledge, who the agent is. "The song was written by an anonymous medieval poet" is an example of the former. "Mistakes were made" is an example of the latter.
Language arts teachers are most likely to complain about passive voice sentences that they want students to recast in active voice, which means most of us have much less practice constructing passive voice sentences on purpose. You wind up saying goofy things like "It is thought by me that frustration would be experienced by your teacher if an essay were submitted by you in which only passive voice was used."
"A new career path has been discovered by me!" I announced. "Other people's writing will be converted by me into passive voice!"
"Your day job," Elwood said drily, "should not be quit by you."
Pete was meeting friends at the climbing gym this evening and he wanted to keep the passive voice thing going the whole way there. "Fun must be had by you! You are loved by me!" I said as I drove away. "Driving home must be completed safely by you! You are loved by me too!" he said in response.
So, you know, just in case you had been saying to yourself, "Hm, I wonder if that Gladly family has gotten any less geeky over the past few years" -- I think that's a no. Or, alternatively, that question would probably be answered in the negative by me.
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