Advice, Part 2

Back in the days when I was acquiring my decision-making muscles, Betty used to say I made decisions "by consensus."  She was right.  Sometimes I still do.

However, I chose a profession in which I got paid to give advice--in the form of grading papers.  As a lover of sentences, I spent many years trying to whet the appetites of college students for well-crafted sentences.  I wrote MM and FRAG and AWK in more margins than I care to remember, and I inserted and deleted commas by the thousands, then I wrote encouraging helpful advice and explained the meaning MM and FRAG and AWK.  I wished many times that the kids who wound up in my classrooms had learned to diagram sentences in seventh grade as I did.

One of my best students ever was a non-traditional student who has long since become a friend, Deb. We had so much in common that we soon became friends--and now she is right on the cusp of a Ph.D in English!  We still laugh that her first reading of MM was mmmmm--as in yummy, when what it really  meant was misplaced modifier.  Deb, a voracious reader and excellent writer, has long since graduated from misplaced modifiers and is probably writing the same comment on her students' papers.

My advice-giving quotient for life was fulfilled as a teacher.  As a lover of sentences and compositions, my mouth almost waters when I encounter one of either that is beautifully made.  I wanted classrooms of eighteen-year-olds to discover the joy of making sentences with subjects and predicates, both, sometimes branching out to add subordinate clauses in the right places.

I did this for decades, but I will never know what percentage of those students read my advice.  Usually, their eyes went straight for the grade without reading all my "helpful" advice.  Once, my day was ruined by seeing a young boy crumple the paper and throw it directly into the trash--after I'd spent a half-hour on his paper, longer no doubt than what he'd spent writing it.  This English teacher had led that boy to water--but apparently he wasn't particularly thirsty for that particular drink?