And the Oscar goes to… Jennie

Her teenage daughter had come home from school that day brandishing her English exam paper and, well, I’ll be darned if an extract of her favourite Aunty Jennie’s column wasn’t the topic of the Grade 10 comprehension exercise! I felt like I’d won a (very small) Oscar.

Here it was at last: validation. I was part of the literary canon. The column itself was something I’d written a few years back about newly minted words, after “selfie” was included in the dictionary, and the students were asked questions about my immortal prose.

Rather chuffed with myself, I asked what sort of questions. The first read as follows: “Explain why the two sentences starting with ‘Or’ and ‘But’ (par 2), although in common usage, are incorrect.” “What?” I spat, because that’s an issue of style, of colloquial usage – of genius!

But there was more… (And there’s another sentence starting with “but”.) “Question five,” my friend continued. “Correct the following errors in paragraphs four and five: punctuation, spelling, grammatically incomplete sentence.” “Errors?!” I shrieked. Sniggering, she told me the instructions above the section.

“Read the text,” it said “which contains deliberate errors…” Oh, sweetest relief. They inserted mistakes, so I am not a complete fool.

“Well,” I said to my friend, “you just tell your daughter that I say whatever she answered is 100% correct, and that if her teachers want to argue, then they can come argue with me. She gets an A.”

However, this reminded me of something that happened to Himself. One of his young adult books was chosen as the setwork for a high school class in America. He discovered that he was now in this fiction stratosphere alongside the likes of Harper Lee when he received an e-mail via his website from one of the students.

So, your book is our reading matter, she told him, and we need to do an essay about your themes, and it’s due tomorrow, so please tell me what your themes are. Amused by her audacity, he replied at length. They went back and forth. She submitted her (his) essay. They got a C.

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