The other day I was walking the dog when Courtney stopped to talk to me.
She had been a terrific student of mine in the sixth grade at Higgins. She also taught my daughter at McComb High School years later. I guess the old saying is correct: What goes around comes around.
She built a tight, meaningful rapport with Kya that helped her through her freshman year. She was a good student and made herself into a good teacher. After a tumultuous courtship, she married a classmate and they have three beautiful, brilliant daughters. Courtney is now teaching in Houston and loving it.
I do love English! I love the ins and outs of English, the rules, and the exceptions to the rules. I love punctuation of possessives and contractions, of clauses and phrases, and of items in a series.
Another area I love is language usage: except/accept, then/than. Adjectives, adverbs, figures of speech, parts of speech. Capitalization is also a favorite. I was always amazed when students did not capitalize their names. What is up with that?
Finally, spelling. I was the sixth grade spelling bee champion of Cincinnati, Ohio. I am a speller from way back!
Over the years, students tried to stump me with difficult words, but no one ever could. And spelling is not mostly learned with me. It is kind of innate. I was born a good speller. (You can imagine my chagrin with my son Tom when he turned out to be a terrible speller because of his auditory discrimination difficulties. I always joked that he cannot spell LSU.)
One thing that was always difficult to make interesting was how to spell the plurals of words. It is pretty cut-and-dried.
When Courtney was in sixth grade, we were going straight through the lesson on plurals. Starting with the first person on row one, everybody had to say the singular form of one of the words, say the plural, spell the plural, and tell the rule for making it plural. For example, a student would say party, parties, p-a-r-t-i-e-s, and the rule: change the y to i and add -es.
A girl sitting beside Courtney was an inclusion student who was the recipient of Courtney’s altruistic nature. Counting up and down the rows, Courtney determined that her friend would have the word “salmon.”
She told her that this was a word that, in fact, did not change spelling when forming the plural. The two of them had an earnest discussion before we got to the friend’s assigned word, but Courtney thought she had made it clear.
However, when we got to the inclusion student, she said, “Salmon, sammiches!” with a lot of self-righteous gusto. Courtney could not look at me, and I could not look at her. We managed to keep our laughter stifled because we would not have hurt the girl’s feelings for anything.
Finally, Courtney managed to say nicely, “Sammiches is so not the plural of salmon.”
She was destined to teach English.
