Grammar -- Ouch!

I was nervous. The weekend was long and full and fun. The homework that I completed on Saturday took seven hours. That was Saturday. Monday was many hours and many thoughts away from learning what I might need to know about interrupted past continuous.

And here I stood before 16 people who assumed by my position in the class and the mere fact that I had the marker in my hand that I might be knowledgeable on this subject (well, actually predicate but we'll get to that in a moment).

I was rewriting notes so I could remember to hold on to the handout until after I had provided instructions as well as noting that I should talk to the class and not the board when I wrote the Marker Sentence. I was somewhat concerned that I hadn't committed every morsel of information out of my grammar book to memory. So I was checking the text . . . again. I was dry lipped, dry mouthed and dry of any sense that this would be smooth sailing.

And then it happened.

One student, after seeing the Marker Sentence (or as I've come to think of it -- That Upon Which All ESL Training Rests), how I highlighted its parts on the board, and had led the class to identify those parts, asked, "Is that part (motioning to the remainder of the sentence after the verb+ing) of the predicate?"

"Predicate!" I'm thinking. "What the heck is the predicate? Oh wait, I remember from ... let's see ... HIGH SCHOOL English class that's the uh . . . the uh . . . well, it has something to do with the verb . . . "

But what I say is, "The predicate is the verb and you're pointing to the adverbial clause. But I'll check and we'll move on for now."

Or at least I meant to say that. What I probably said was unintelligible. But I did check and I did discover that whatever was related to the verb was the predicate and I did admit it and class did go on and two students did seem to move from no comprehension of the fact that they can take was/were+verb+ing+the simple past and say, "While I was teaching ESL, I sucked at grammar."

The good news is that I wasn't being graded on my knowledge of predicates. The best news is that students got what they were supposed to. The somewhere in between news is that I have high hopes that that sucking sound I heard is not part of my future tense!