{"id":584,"date":"2012-01-12T14:59:47","date_gmt":"2012-01-12T13:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=584"},"modified":"2012-11-04T22:58:41","modified_gmt":"2012-11-04T21:58:41","slug":"phone-you-and-the-phone-you-rode-in-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=584","title":{"rendered":"Phone You and the Phone You Rode in on!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"iStrobe\"<\/a>\u201cSo, if she go to party, she will there be have a good time,\u201d Student A has begun sweating from the effort of forming this conditional sentence.<\/p>\n

\u201cOK, good job,\u201d I am writing in my oops-book. \u201cSo, which conditional is that?\u201d<\/p>\n

Student A says, \u201cFirst one.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRight and what time period does it refer to?\u201d<\/p>\n

About thirty seconds later, Student A says, \u201cThe First conditional is for future actions dependent on the result of another future action or event, where there is a reasonable possibility of the conditions for the action being satisfied.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWow, great. So, how about the second conditional?\u201d<\/p>\n

Student B chimes in, \u201cThe contrary-to-fact present conditional, often referred to as the second conditional is used to refer to a current state or event that is known to be false or improbable.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am amazed, especially since Student B has recently used the term charkekeyal<\/em> instead of table<\/em>. \u201cYes, wow, that was\u2026wow, remarkably well stated.\u201d I gather myself and look around the room. \u201cThird conditional?\u201d<\/p>\n

When Student C uses the word protasis<\/em> and the phrase subject-verb inversion<\/em>, I smell that something is afoot. Well that, and every single person in the room, except for me, is staring into their desks.<\/p>\n

I approach Student A and peer onto his desk where he is scanning a website called Englishgrammar.com on what is called a \u201cSmartphone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMystery solved,\u201d I say. Detective Colombo, I am not.<\/p>\n

If anyone is paying for crimes made as a child, it is me.<\/p>\n

I remember elementary school as fondly as one might their time at Guantanamo\u2019s Secret Visitor\u2019s Section. I recall days of tortuous boredom interspersed with fooling around followed by moments of shrill yelling coming from terrifying penguin-like nuns.<\/p>\n

I developed a reputation as a one person wrecking crew for nuns. In six years of Catholic school, I sent four nuns to an early grave and another two to drink. One spent the rest of her life in an asylum. Sadly, until I published a book last year, this and a m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois were my greatest accomplishments.<\/p>\n

So when I became a teacher, the nuns pulled some strings with whoever runs this universe and demanded the invention of a device to ruin my life.<\/p>\n

\u201cSmartphone\u201d was invented five minutes after this imagined conversation.<\/p>\n

They are a technological manifestation of my bad karma. The main problem is, and I think we can all agree on this, that the internet is more interesting than English grammar. Unless you can somehow add sex and animal attack videos to grammar, which is not an entirely bad idea.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan I please have that phone, Student A?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n

With this question the students\u2019 collective attention is finally upon me. Students A through M regard me with shock and horror; as though I had proposed a fat-free diet or viewing a Michael Bay film.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I watch anything,\u201d he replies, his English returning to its rightful pre-intermediate position.<\/p>\n

Though there is no meter to test my current level of annoyance, my face must betray it because he hands me \u201cSmartphone\u201d with a shaky hand. Playing on the screen is a video of a kid skateboarding up a ramp and then taking a dreadful fall onto the asphalt. As with any human, idiotic skateboarders destroying themselves is like a fantastic drug, but somehow I break away from \u201cSmartphone\u2019s\u201d claws of entertainment.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am going to turn this off now,\u201d I say, my immediate realization being that I have no idea how to undertake such an activity. I look from another skateboarder smashing into a truck to a round button at the bottom of the phone. I hold my breath and hit it. As the skateboarders are replaced with a picture of a nude woman eating ice cream, I am relieved that the phone hasn\u2019t turned into a car of some sort.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s this \u201cSmartphone,\u201d no telling what those damn nuns will get the next one to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cSo, if she go to party, she will there be have a good time,\u201d Student A has begun sweating from the effort of forming this conditional sentence. \u201cOK, good job,\u201d I am writing in my oops-book. \u201cSo, which conditional is that?\u201d Student A says, \u201cFirst one.\u201d \u201cRight and what time period does it refer to?\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-9q","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=584"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1061,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions\/1061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}