Getting Away With It

"Tee-cha, why you write children's?" Alper asks me, his brow furrowed.

I wheel around and look at the board where I have written the following sentence: The children's room is the smallest room in our house.

My mouth gapes open. "Why did I write it...?"

Alper makes a vague gesture with one hand. "Why you write--" He turns to the boy sitting next to him and mutters something in Turkish. After a moment of consultation, they look up at me "ah-pose-trph," Alper concludes, the wrinkle still between his eyebrows.

I look at the board again. "Apostrophe?" I ask, pointing to the offending punctuation mark.

He nods vigorously.

"Because the room belongs to the children, so you use an apostrophe after 'children' and before the S," I explain.

"No, tee-cha, mistake!" shouts Aysa. "Apostrophe always after S!"

Aysa is one of those students who make me bring Bufferin to class: she knows it all even if she doesn't. Oddly enough, learning time after time that she is wrong hasn't put a dent in her astonishing confidence. Aysa has corrected my spelling, my grammar, and my syntax, and bless her, she has never once been right. During the break, I'm happy to let her teach me Turkish pronunciation because this gives her a gratifying sense of her own superiority -- but I'm damned if I'm going to let her get away with this now.

"The S comes after the N in children's," I say sternly. "Children is already plural."

She doesn't believe me, but it is time for my break and boy, do I need it. When I get back fifteen minutes later, Aysa has her grammar book open to plurals and she looks suitably chagrined.

I don't rub it in, though. I'm above that.

But two days later, she's at it again. We're doing personal descriptions this week, and on the board I've written the following sentence: What is your boyfriend like?

Aysa is practically leaping out of her chair at this. "Tee-cha, not is, does!" she splutters, pointing an accusatory finger.

Uh oh -- have I made a mistake? It's not unheard of, after all. I study the board, but no: everything's fine. "Look, there's no mistake here, the question is--"

But Aysa is half out of her seat, scrabbling for her grammar book again. "Tee-cha, what do you like to do?" she calls triumphantly, tapping her book with one stubby finger. "Boyfriend he, so does," she concludes breathlessly. "No what IS boyfriend like, what DOES boyfriend like!" The look in her eye says it all: this time she's got me -- victory is hers!

Confused and exasperated, I go to look. What do you like to do in your free time? I read. Now I'm the one with a crease between my eyebrows.

Then I get it. The crease between my eyebrows turns into a tiny flashbulb just over my head.

Back at the board, I write the following: What is your boyfriend like? and What does your boyfriend like doing in his free time? I explain briefly that What is he like? and What does he like? mean different things entirely.

Aysa watches warily, her eyes distrustful. Even now, she suspects I'm trying to pull a fast one.

I don't rub it in, though. I'm above that.

Fast forward one week. I am teaching my last class on my longest teaching day. My feet hurt, my head is throbbing, and one teacher is off ill, so I've got two classes rolled into one, and worse still, I'm teaching a lesson I've had no chance to prepare for. It's standing room only, and the class is about as quiet as Grand Central Station during rush hour.

"BE QUIET!" I roar for the third time, but no one pays me any heed. So I scrawl it across the board in four-inch letters.

An instant hush fills the room. They're never this responsive! I can hardly believe my good luck.

Aysa stares at me, her mouth hanging open. "Tee-cha QUIT!" she practically shouts.

"What?"

"Beekwit!"

If she were on her feet, she'd be jumping up and down. The boy next to her is pointing to the board, so I turn around.

And I see what I've gone and written in my flustered haste: BE QUIT!

Now this tale could end here. Aysa could have had her Great Victory and I could have ended up with egg on my face. But the fates were with me.

"Open your books to page 58!" I splutter, after correcting the offending QUIT to QUIET.

There is a great rustling as fifty students open their books, and half the class smiles and nods. One boy laughs out loud and gives me an appreciative wink. And I read the instructions to the lesson I so hastily cobbled together: Find the mistake in the text . We're doing a unit on error correction.

Aysa casts me a baleful look. Her arch enemy, Mary the All Grammatical, has scored again.

My very first whopper of a mistake and I've completely and utterly gotten away with it.

I may not rub it in, but I'm damned if I'll ever tell.

Objective, Subjective

"Tee-cha, can you explain?"

It's my break, but Alper is standing there, notebook in hand, looking troubled. Alper needs all the help he can get, but quite apart from that, Alper is one of the students I've identified as a trier. He may not be Einstein, but boy, does he do his best. He turns in his homework every time, faithfully writes in his journal, and frequently asks me reasonably pertinent questions. I will do just about anything for a student who tries -- they're thin on the ground around here. Giving up my break is the very least I can do.

"What do you want me to explain?"

"Why this did this one not?"

"I'm sorry, can you repeat that?"

"Why this did, this one not did?" He holds out the notebook. In it, he has written the following two sentences:

Who did Madonna marry? and Who married Madonna?

"Why this one did, this one not did?" he asks.

Okay, now I get it: he wants to know why you use the auxiliary verb 'did' in the first question, but not in the second question.

Fortunately, I'm right on top of this one: I asked a Turkish colleague about it just last month. This is one of those niggling idiosyncrasies that we native speakers of English manage to absorb with our graham crackers and milk, but non-native speakers have to learn explicitly. Fortunately for me, I teach with a lot of non-native speakers of English. I've never met a non-native speaker of English worth his or her salt who couldn't explain this better than I can.

"Okay," I say now, writing on the board Who did Madonna marry? " In this sentence, Madonna is the subject because she is the one who is marrying someone." I point out that the word who here should technically be whom because it is the object of the sentence, not the subject. And that when the answer is not the same as the subject, we have to use the auxiliary did. I then explain how the opposite is true in the sentence Who married Madonna? In this sentence, Who is the subject, and the answer will be the same as the subject, so we don't use the auxiliary.

We go through a few more examples of this until Alper obviously understands. He leaves the classroom with a satisfied look on his face and I feel like doing a little jig on my desk; it's not often that I get my point across. Now Alper knows the difference between the objective and the subjective and one little bit of chaos has been turned to order.

But I've missed my break and I'm more than ready for a trip to the ladies' room after the class. Unfortunately, when I get back to the teachers' lounge, I am irritated to see that the key is missing -- again. I scrawl the following sentence on the board: Will whoever took the ladies' room key please return it?

A few hours later, as I'm getting ready to leave for the day, I see that some idiot has changed my perfectly correct whoever to the incorrect whomever. Shocking but true: one of my colleagues does not know the difference between the objective and the subjective.

On the board, I circle the offending whomever and write the following: Will whoever made this correction please consider a review of the subjective and objective cases?

I know I could have just walked away from this, but I'm all about order over chaos.