Fergalicious Def....

With the help of "The Dutchess," I now know how to spell the following words:

glamorous
delicious
tastEy (other less reliable sources tell me that there is no "E" but they obviously don't know what they're talking about)

Thank you, Fergie.

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"And I'm like 'get up out my face' 'fore I turn around and spray yo' ass with mace." - The Ferg...brilliance

I mean, seriously?

I remember in Junior Honors English in high school, we were reading The Grapes of Wrath. My teacher asked how a box of Cracker Jacks relates to the story. I gave this fantastic metaphor about with Cracker Jacks, you have four options:

1) You eat and eat and eat until finally your hard work is paid off with the special prize.
2) You don't like Cracker Jacks, but you eat them anyway to get the special prize.
3) You cheat and throw the Cracker Jacks away just to get to the special prize.
4) You don't like Cracker Jacks, and who cares about the special prize?

Suck was with the story. The Joad family could have worded hard for a better life despite obstacles, or they could have given up.

Isn't that fabulous?

"No, that's not right."

Whhhhhhat?

That was freaking brilliant!

You want to know what she said?

"Cracker Jacks are sweet, and so if life."

What the hell?

A third grader could have come up with that! Anything could apply to it:

"M&Ms are sweet, and so is life."

"Honeysuckles are sweet, and so is life."

"Surfing is sweet, dude! And so is life."

I mean, seriously, what the hell?

What the hell, Mrs. Gooch?

What the hell?

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"The secret of teaching is to appear to have known all your life what you learned this afternoon."
---John Skow

A Brief Lesson in Grammar

I know for some people, grammar may not seem important in their day to day lives; however, because I am a future English teacher, and because it just drives me nuts, I have decided to put together a mini-lesson with the basic necessities.

1) noun - person, place, thing, or idea (example: Grandma, Vermont, doll, love)
adjective - descriptive word that modifies a noun (ex: red shoes, tiny hand, crazy lady)
adverb - describes verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs; tells how or where (ex: quickly
ran, clumsily undressed)
conjunction - connects words phrases, and clauses (ex: he and I, neither here nor there,
handsome yet slimy)
pronoun - stands in for a noun (ex: he, she, it, they, me)
verb - shows action (ex: jump, think, love, hop)
interjection - interrupts (ex: hey!, hark!)
preposition - connects nouns by showing some kind of relationship (ex: over the hedge,
up a creek)

(^^LEARN THESE; KNOW THESE!!!^^)

2) No double negatives! Read the following sentence: "I don't have no money!" Does this look correct to you? If not, then bravo. If so, why??? Do you even realize what this sentence actually means? You are really saying, "I don't have a nonexistent amount of money," which is another way to say that you have money, because you are saying that you don't have NO money. Get it?

3) To quote Ross from Friends, "Y-o-u-apostrophe-r-e means 'you are'. Y-o-u-r means 'your'!" These two words are not interchangeable--they mean very different things! An English teacher of mine once told us a little trick: the presence of an apostrophe means that it is replacing something else; therefore, it should be easier to tell that "you're" means "you are" because the apostrophe clues us in that it is replacing the "a" in "you are". This area of grammar also applies to "its/it's," "their/they're/there," etc.

4) "I" is a proper noun. It should be capitalized!

5) She and I went shopping...NOT...she and me went shopping!!! Here's a trick: Take out "she". Would you say, "Me went shopping?" Nope.

6) Subjects and verbs must agree! Read: "A book of matches were found under the corpse." Right? Wrong. There is only one book of matches; therefore, the sentence should read, "A book of matches was found under the corpse."

7) Please use punctuation. Run-ons are no fun and hard to read.

I probably sound quite pompous. I am. haha.......Anyway, just think before you type, and I'll be happy.

- Ms. Cynic


PS: I'm sure I'll make a mistake soon, and people will pounce me me. Can't wait. :D

who knows?

Sometimes I wonder....are the people around me really that inconsiderate, or do I just expect too much from people...?

I honestly think it's the former.

Yummmmmmm!

I should sell my baked spaghetti.

It's to die for.

Hi, friends.

Apologies for the brief hiatus.

Back soon!

To be or not to be?

To be or not to be? At U.S. colleges, it's increasingly 'not'

May 21, 2007

BY ANNE D. NEAL

The world loves Shakespeare. But American universities don't.

That is the conclusion of a new study released by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The report, "The Vanishing Shakespeare," surveyed English curricula at 70 major American colleges and universities. Only 15 require their English majors to take a course on Shakespeare. The rest allow the English teachers of tomorrow to graduate without studying the language's greatest writer in depth.

Only one institution requires Shakespeare in the Ivy League -- Harvard. And a mere three others of U.S. News' top 25 liberal arts colleges -- Middlebury, Smith and Wellesley -- require the study of the Bard.

At most of America's top colleges, Shakespeare is simply an elective -- one among many. That puts him on a par with literature courses on "Nags, Bitches and Shrews" at Dartmouth; Los Angeles, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Baywatch at Northwestern; baseball at Emory, and "Cool Theory," at Duke, where students devote themselves to the study of a single word of American slang.

It used to be that our colleges and universities could be counted on to introduce students to the central works, events and figures who have shaped our world as part of a shared conversation. But not anymore.

Students can now graduate from most of the top-ranked colleges in America without having much meaningful exposure to anything. Indeed, in today's academy, there has been a breakdown in the belief that a shared core of learning is important, or that some subjects are more worthy than others. As former Harvard Dean Harry Lewis explains in Excellence without a Soul: "Universities are having a hard time making the case that the education they offer is about anything in particular. 'Breadth' and 'choice' have become goals in themselves."

Mind you, most colleges claim otherwise. Haverford College's English department, for example, claims to "maintain a working balance between an enduring commitment to the traditional canon of English and American literature and an expanding horizon of fresh concerns." And yet, there the Bard is not even an option. In 2006-2007, Haverford College's English department did not offer a single Shakespeare course.

And it's not just Shakespeare who's in trouble. When ACTA surveyed the general education requirements of 50 colleges in 2004, 88 percent did not require a broad literature survey and 86 percent did not require a basic American history or civics course. That's why institutions like UCLA -- which requires its English majors to take Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton -- are rare, but Hamilton College, which recently scuttled plans for a new scholarly center to study its namesake, Alexander Hamilton, is nothing unusual.

The idea that the Bard and the Founders are unworthy of special attention, of course, does not have much currency in the outside world. That's surely the case in the Windy City, where the Web site for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater highlights "acclaimed productions of William Shakespeare's canon." Why is it, then, that our colleges have such different values?

A college curriculum should not be a do-it-yourself kit. But that is, in fact, what it has become. Instead of directing the next generation of Americans to the most important authors and ideas that ensure an educated person, our universities have abdicated their professional responsibility in favor of "anything goes."

In our global world, it is surely more important than ever for college graduates to understand the civilization that produced them. But if our colleges don't insist that even their English majors study Shakespeare, who will pass on that knowledge to future generations?

Trustees, alumni, parents and students should not sit idly by while the attack on academic values goes unchallenged. It is imperative that all of us demand change and essential that our colleges and universities refocus their efforts on academic quality and academic value. Restoring Shakespeare to his proper place would be a good place to start.