object lessons

the first two weeks of my first-year writing courses, i ask my students to summarize and respond to a few short articles on the atrocious conditions inside our local county jail. i read these pieces and pluck from them choice sentences that exemplify some of the most common grammatical mistakes first-year students make: subject/verb agreement, no apostrophe "s" to signify possessive, incorrect verb tense, misspellings, article choice, sentence fragments, run-ons, and colloquialisms, mostly. (yes, i know it might be surprising to some that a first-year college student -- one who has already passed the first part of the two-part writing sequence -- will make these mistakes, but it is true.) these sentences become an object lesson in grammar, and it gets a rise out of the students because they will more often than not find their own among those needing revision.

checking out one of the examples of colloquial writing on the page, a plucky young woman claimed "you can tell this sentence was written by a man. look at it!" the sentence in question began with "matter of fact" and continued in a very conversational way, including a "just sayin is all" near the end. i happened to know that, in fact, a woman wrote the sentence, so i asked the student who assumed the author's gender why she believed this. "you can just TELL!" she said, and read the sentence aloud in what most of us what call "a man's voice" and we all had a good laugh. when i told her it was written by a woman, many of the students did not believe me.

later, during the same class but after the grammar lesson was over, i was reviewing the short book i'm having students read this semester that has a chapter on gender and incarceration. "what's gender?" i asked, knowing exactly where the conversation would go. one student replied, "like if you're a man or a woman." not exactly, i countered, and began to outline the way that some theorists conceptualize the sex/gender binary, and briefly glossed the biological, medical, cultural, and social ways that these two terms function in the US, at least in the contemporary moment. i said "penis" and "labia" and "estrogen" and "vas deferens" and "ovaries" and "testicles" and "clitoral hood" much to the amusement of the students (students seem to love any direct reference to the body and its functions -- probably because they don't usually think of them as having any intellectual substance, so to speak), and then made a case for gender as a more socially mediated category (although we all might know that "sex" is just as discursive as "gender," but i am trying to introduce them to the subject, so we were only going this far) available to us through the slippery variations of masculinities and femininities. they seemed to get it, but still some puzzled looks.

i returned to the comment about the sentence that my student believed was written by a man (but that wasn't). "you wouldn't call the sentence 'male,' right?" i said, continuing, "it would be more accurate to describe it as masculine -- it's not like the sentence has a penis hanging off the end of it," i concluded, much to the great delight of my students, who seemed to fully grasp [grasp!?] the concept. thinking i had really knocked it out of the park, i turned to erase the board, and behind me the voice of a young man quipped, loudly, "yeah, but you have to admit -- that sentence DO have its period."

it's rare that i am so tickled by a student's joke that i laugh to the point of no return, but this unexpected, smart, hilarious joke sent me over the edge. i laughed so hard i had to sit down and pound my fist on the desk.

best. grammar. gender. pun. ever!!