A Method in the Madness

“Fifty percent of what people say when they are joking is true, which means, you do wanna go to this wedding but you are too afraid to admit it. So, by making some sort of joke about it, you get to say what you really want without being vulnerable.”

The Sweetest Thing

So, you know I “joke” about wanting my students to stand up on their desks and salute me as their captain. I “joke” about it in my profile and I may have “joked” about it a few times in my posts.

So fine. Maybe there is a little truth to it. I mean, I don’t literally want my students to stand on their desks. Of course, if they felt compelled to, I wouldn’t tell them to get down, but that’s not really my main issue. I am envious of John Keating, not because his students saluted him as their "Captain," but because he taught literature.

I love literature, and I would love to teach it. Of course, I love grammar too, but there’s a different kind of pleasure that is derived from expounding on the proper uses of the comma than that of discussing the poetry that drips off the page of a Toni Morrison novel.

Well, today, while I was grading papers, something glorious happened: grammar and literature met. Some of my students’ work reminded me of these famous words from Hamlet:

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.”

These words were spoken by Polonius about Hamlet. This is a grammar blog so I won’t go into the context, but basically, what he is saying is that Hamlet is crazy, but within that craziness, there is some kind of cleverness- just like these sentences from my students:

I like all kinds of movies, but foreign films are my guilty pressure.

At first glance, it seems as though what she meant to write was guilty pleasure. But, let’s think about it for a second; maybe she did actually mean guilty pressure. He’s Just Not That into You is a guilty pleasure. 27 Dresses is a guilty pleasure. Basically, any movie starring Jennifer Aniston or Katherine Heigl is a guilty pleasure. But, foreign films not only often require the reading of subtitles but are also often complex and nuanced. Maybe this student knows she should watch Fellini and Godard, but would really rather watch Love Happens- hence her guilty pressure.

It made me believe that there was a chance to find someone who I could spend the rest of your life with.

This seems like pronoun madness, or is it? Maybe she’s just being realistic. Let’s do the math. This student is probably eighteen years old. By the time she finds someone to spend the rest of her life with, she’ll be, let’s guess, twenty-eight. By that time, I will be forty-four. With the divorce rate so high, she has more of a chance spending the rest of my life with someone than hers.

I need to learn how to chanel my artistic abilities.

This is definitely an error, but is it a spelling error or a capitalization error? She could want to learn how to channel her artistic abilities, but I do teach at a fashion college, so she could want to learn how to Chanel her artistic abilities. If she meant the latter, brilliant!

Speaking of Chanel, I wish my husband made enough money so I could afford a Chanel handbag.

I'm totally kidding.