Crazies

Midterm testing has just concluded and everyone is relieved. As you fellow educators may know, writing a test is not always perfect. Mistakes are made sometimes and you do your best to correct them before the students take the test. Well, today we received a phone call from a concerned mother. She is an English teacher at another school and was looking over her daughters test and found what she thought was an error. The question asked the students to find the grammatically correct sentence out of five. They were:

1. When I am a child, I want to be a doctor.
2. This doll is made of papers.
3. He can't speak no French at all.
4. When I get home, it began to rain.
5. I have a lot of homework do today.

The mother's complaint was that all the sentences were incorrect. My coteachers then came to me and asked if this was so. Number 2 was originally supposed to be, "This doll is made of paper.", but through a mistake it had an extra "s" tacked on. To me, #2 is correct. I said that it was fine, saying the sentence with or without the s made sense and that was okay.

After calling the woman back and telling her this, she seemed irate and then consulted the Native English Speaker at her school. They told her, and I quote, "That when you are talking about raw materials, you use the plural form that's singular." I personally didn't know that there were any rules in the English language that were exceptional to raw materials, so I told her no, that was not true. The sentence is correct. I used the examples, "The car is made of metals" (or metal) and "The wall is made of bricks" (or brick) to show that either the plural form or the singular form made sense. After hearing that, she said that those examples were exceptions to the rule and it was simply not the case with paper. She still did not agree and said she would call back.

Shortly there after, she called and said that she had spoken to two other Native English speakers in the district and they said she was right. Forseeing this, I had already spoken to Danny and Tane about this and got their support, so it created a stale mate. My coteachers decided that they would consult the Vice Principal who had a Masters degree in English. They then had a meeting and decided that right or wrong, they were going to side with the other woman just so she would shut the hell up and not cause any problems. So after several hours of research, phone pooling, and discussion between schools all over the district they decided to award her daughter ONE extra point. Who knows how she might spend her weekend. So they decided to throw the question out.

By the way, her daughter thought the sentence, "He can't speak no French at all." was correct. Idiot.

This woman is apparently notorious. She's known throughout the city for being a pain in the ass and it was probably a battle not worth fighting.

So, I put it to you. Are all the sentences wrong or is number 2 a correct sentence? Tane wants to make the argument that number 1 could be correct too. "You could say, 'when I am a child,' in an abstract metaphorical sense...when I'm in the spirit of childhood I am a doctor...Like "when I'm in never-never land I am a doctor.""

So leave a comment or shoot me and email and tell me what you think.