Four down, two more to go.

Literature IV ended today. Ms Sunbeam, Adoravelle and I all agree on the fact that it was a nice paper.

By the way, I stayed for an extra two hours in college because it rained heavily and I had no umbrella. So I sat down to help Ms Sunbeam to mark papers for her Foundation in Arts students. And goodness me, the mistakes they made. Not that I'm trying to impose my intelligence on people or anything. It's just....... well. Laymen like us shouldn't be making these mistakes.

We were supposed to rewrite a passage with correct grammar and sentence structure. The original sentence was "It is necessary that teachers should to be knowledgeable in their major fields." And among the responses I got were :

"Because it is not necessary that teachers should be knowledgeable in their major fields"
"It is not necessary that teachers be..." etc.

But the one that you and I can agree upon, the funniest of the day -

Original text : "The teacher must be to possess...."
"Corrected" version : "The teacher must be possessed !"

That "corrected" phrase brought me back to my Literature works.

It reminded me of how Malvolio, a character in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" was deemed to be mad, possessed by the devil - and the people who were plotting to humiliate him - Maria, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek - all decided to throw him into a dark room with chains. And to taunt him even more, Feste the clown was dressed up as Sir Topas, a certain priest, and with his pseudo-philosophical arguments he managed to get Malvolio to hold the devil at the staff's end.

Back to grammar. We speak what we are comfortable with - as long as you understand me and I understand you, it makes no difference. But when someone from outside comes to ask the way, we cringe - because having been used to our Manglish, it's hard to switch back to normal, grammatically correct English unless we're used to speaking correct English all the time. I don't know how I had the patience to mark those papers. Perhaps it was from those years of experience mom gave me while she was giving tuition to my neighbours - she insisted on me speaking proper English, even at home, and she insisted on me marking the papers.

But my, those statements were the spectacle of the day.