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Tuesday, January 29, 2008


I'll be the one ranting and raving now for a change.

I've patiently listened to you guys complain about everything under the sun before, in your blogs, here, in the cbox. Now it's your chance to hear about my peeves:


Here I am, on a Tuesday afternoon, home early and seated in the study because I've cleared out my very busy weekday schedule to come home, where there is no distraction, focus and mark your discursive essays (in case you don't know, I'm usually so busy with my other school stuff that I hardly have time to mark so I have to MAKE time to sit down properly to mark, especially when it comes to essays). I'm all geared up and mentally ready to analyse what you've written so that I can give you comments on how you can improve your content for a discursive topic, to return you this Thursday before I get you to write out your first draft for your 2nd essay.

But I can't. I find it sooooooooo HARD to think about the content of the essay.

Not that I can't think - my analytical mind works perfectly well, thank you. It is thanks to some of your wonderful lack of effort to present your essay in proper spelling and punctuation that's causing my inability to comment on your writing.

"WHAT?" I hear some of you respond, but listen to this: It is very difficult to read an essay for what its worth in thought if there are just too many mistakes, even if I'm not marking it.

It's even more difficult for a mind whose training and preoccupation is to pick out mistakes in essay.

Don't understand? In simple words, it means: Because I am a teacher whose job is to correct errors, I will not be able to mark your essay properly for content if you punctuate your essays not just with fullstops and commas, but also with a zillion mistakes.

To be fair, I'm NOT expecting an essay to be absolutely free of grammar mistakes, but give me a break lah. Do you know how many essays I have to read with the small letter 'i' for the first person pronoun? Do you know how many "I"s are written in each essay on the average? I'm reading so many essays that don't have correct punctuation either. Simple stuff like spacing between words and after fullstops.

Remember why I said we should all try to reduce grammar / punctuation errors, why I actively practise peer-editing in class? IF there are less mistakes in your essay, I can concentrate on the more important stuff like content, sentence structure, whether your ideas flow etc.

Now I'm painfully going through essays, some of which I can't help but see all the mistakes sitting there in the lines and staring me in the face - just how am I to focus on your points?

If you don't understand why I'm so bothered, get this: I want to give you good comments so that you can improve. Discursive essay is not easy and I want to give you all the help I can give, but I realise I'm not getting much help from you if you just submit an essay you didn't bother to check at all for simple errors.


Enough said. I still HAVE TO mark those essays and give comments. Read this everyone, and those culprits, be knocked over with guilt when you get back your essays because I had a HARD TIME reading it.

I'm hoping part of my frustration will dissipate with this entry, but I have this sinking feeling that it'll all rise again each time I get one of those essays.


Your (rather disgruntled) EL teacher,
Mrs Foo



5:14 PM

We will still be friends forever.