Stuff my students write

I know I’m not alone in my fascination with word errors. Based on the very scientific method of occasionally noticing what my Facebook friends post on their walls, Damn You, Autocorrect has a pretty strong following. Being a teacher definitely gives a person the opportunity to find hilarious errors of all kinds, and being an English teacher – particularly to students whose first language is not English – usually gives me enough funny word errors to take some of the sting out of losing so many weekends to grading papers.

Yes, that’s right, once again the word error blog post is back. As usual, I’ve edited nothing. But first, a short prologue:

As most of you know, I love teaching, and I usually adore my students to the point of wanting to spend my free time creating new activities or lessons in order to help them learn the material in an easier or more enjoyable way. I think many of you know this. So, this (or the others before) type of blog post is in no way trying to make fun of my students or show that I hate teaching. Some people might not realize how much time teachers -- especially language teachers -- spend grading papers. Alone. All alone. For hours. And days. It's enough to sometimes nearly drive me over the edge. Laughing at some of the funny errors makes my life during grading times more bearable. (That and a lot of chocolate.) Please know that I'm not laughing at my students, just the errors, and that I would just as gladly laugh at my language errors (and I have some really good ones from my Japanese learning), because, well, they're funny.

Without further ado, here are the newest "stuff my students write" sentences:

“Other countrys have been fighting over political issues like erection disagreement.”

(Yes, I’m sure that many battles have been fought due to men’s penises. In fact, perhaps all fights are, by six degrees of separation or less, related to a man’s penis?)

“People will come with things like money and food to help the family which has been deceased.”

(Because dead people also need money and food?)

“They have a language called Yao and they are fishmen.”

(Quick: Fishman vs. Spiderman, who would win?)

“Malawi is a very beautiful country which has alot of tourists which attracts people.”

(Who doesn’t like some tourist eye candy? But what I want to know is: WHERE are all the good-looking male tourists that will attract me? Because I want to be there.)

“Always wears white paints and also white T-shit.”

(First, paint the poo white. Then, paint yourself white. Before the paint dries, stick the poo to the paint on your body. Now, you are stylin’!)

“In life there are a lot of things involved. Some of them are good while other’s are bad examples are many.”

(Wow, thanks SO much for enlightening me about life. Examples of bad things are many, and they include misuse of apostrophes and boring sentences.)

The making of new words always shows a student’s creativity:

“People celebrate their weeding, birthday and anvessary at the lakes.”

(I, for one, always appreciate a good weeding. Why not celebrate that?)

“This dances bring indentity to people as they save there culture.”

(This sentence has so many errors that it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.)

“They [cars] have made traveling become quite ralaxonble than before.”

And finally, a sentence to taunt those punctuation-obsessed teachers:

“Computers are tools used to cutt down costs on effeciencies in businesss in return offer information that will help in decision making and to help the business stay in the competition without information businesses would be caught out the competition.”

(Who says punctuation is over-rated?)