"I guess so," said the blond ex-tin man in the duster...

[verilyverity]

What is up with the burly detectivism in Tin Man?  Never have I encountered a fandom so dead set on replacing characters' names and pronouns with ridiculous sounding proxies.  And passive voice!  With a verb that takes an object!  How can that even sound right to an author?

ETA: Ye gods and little fishes!  *stares at ballooning comments*

Comments

[amedia]

Well, in elementary school, we didn't have English, we had Language Arts, and I remember that we had this program called SLA, where we went to the learning station (open classroom) and read little stories pre-sorted by our reading levels, and answered questions. If you got enough right in one category, you got to move up to the next, so at least it wasn't boring; if you were able to read at a higher level, you got to read stories at that level. We also did a little grammar in 5th or 6th grade, stuff about subjects and objects, although I remember the teacher was wrong at least once and I had to correct her, which was startling because *she* would have gone to school back in the day when people learned stuff, whereas nowadays teachers my age were in school in the rainbow-kitten days and have something approaching an excuse. [Note: this was a public school in a well-to-do district on the East Coast. I went to a private elementary school for grades 1-4 but honestly, 1967 was a LONG time ago and I don't remember it very well.]

In junior high and high school English class, we read stuff. Poetry, plays, novels. We learned about metaphors, analogies, synecdoche, metonymy, and so on, and ideas, and characters, and the different types of plots, and dramatic irony, and that sort of thing. [Junior high was spent in two well-funded public schools, high school in two private prep schools.] I started taking French in junior high after a couple years of baby-French in 3rd and 4th grade, so that was really where I was learning grammar. My second high school also offered Latin, so I began taking that junior year, and found that I *still* didn't know enough grammar. Whew!

I loved my English teacher in my second high school. We still write to each other.