Day 116: Catsup

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Students will be able to define “theme” and identify theme in various texts.

Today was kind of a half-a**ed day in which I stole lesson plans from my teacher next door and downloaded bell work off the internet. The issue with doing this and NOT adequately reading the work beforehand is that I occasionally have the wrong answer and I don’t notice weird typos that trip up my students. For example, the bell work (I googled “Grammar worksheets high school”) included this sentence:

“Neither Max nor Clara (use, uses) catsup on hamburgers and French fries.”

This is a subject/verb agreement that people get wrong all the time – when we use neither/nor, it turns a compound subject (Max and Clara) into a singular one (Max NOR Clara), so the correct verb form is “uses”. But that’s not what got my students stuck. Instead, they focused almost exclusively on the word “catsup”. Many had never seen it before. I spent several minutes of attendance-taking time convincing them that it was, in fact, a real word, and that it was synonymous with the word “ketchup.” Many didn’t believe me. A brief history of the two terms can be found on Foodiggity, and the resulting confusion can be found in my tenth grade English class. I can never predict what will be the sticking point each day. Most likely they’ll forget the neither/nor rule of subject/verb agreement, but they’ll all remember the word “catsup.”