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Saturday, December 29, 2007

My experiments with English grammar!!!

My mind went back to my school days for a second, while I was drafting an e-mail in Outlook. Now to do a spelling or grammar check while drafting a mail, you just need to right click the mouse and this is quite easy. During my school days, I had a tough time learning English grammar. The tenses were the most complex one for me. And for questions related to those in exams, I just used to keep on distributing “has”, “have” or “had” alternatively in order to bring about a balance between them.

The real tough time was during weekends and holidays when my Dad used to give me exercises in grammar. Just before he leaves to office, he will call and ask me to bring my English text book. Then he will give me some exercises to do the same day. The first thing that he will ask on his return to home is the book in which I have done the exercises. Then the real fun starts…. pinching, beating, flapping and it goes on endlessly. The worst part of it was that I had to justify each and every answer that I have written to him. The whole drama will come to an end only when my Mom comes in between or when she calls me for dinner.

Later on I tried not to come in front of my Dad whenever he gets ready to go to office. I will go to toilet (the separate one, outside my house) and will keep on watching through the windowpane to check whether he has left home or not. Another idea was to go to our neighbour’s house. From both the places I will come back only when I am sure that he had left to office.

One of the memorable incidents that happened during my English learning was when my Dad had found out a mistake in my notebook. I have given wrong answer for a particular question (kind of a 3 marks question). Actually this answer was dictated and given from my school itself. So he wrote a letter and asked me to hand it over to my teacher. In that he had also mentioned the correct answer for that question. The teacher did admit the mistake and corrected it. I was asked to convey her thanks to my Dad. But I found that the new answer (the one given by my Dad) is a bit longer than the previous one and is difficult to learn also. Finally for the examination, the same question was asked. And of course I wrote the old answer which was short and simple :-). I didn’t take the pain to learn the answer given by my Dad as it was longer and complex. I still remember the moment when I got my answer sheet after evaluation. My teacher asked me “why did you write it wrong”. Most of the people in my class has written the wrong answer as I did. And among the boys, I became the sheep with the black fleece.

For High School English-2 examinations, outline-story is a usual 5 marks question in which the outline of a story will be given. You have to expand and frame it as a good story. But it was pretty easy for me as I used to put prepositions in between and complete the whole story in few minutes. Now I really feel like missing my Dad… :-)