I was subbing in a ninth grade English class yeterday morning and this morning. I must say, ninth graders can be quite a handfull, but they can also be quite entertaining. We were doing an exercise where the students were making up and writing on the board a sentence that had two possible words to fit in a blank, and they were supposed to figure out as a class which was the proper word to go into the blank. One student’s example:
“Bob am/are going to the peep show.”
I said, “There is no correct answer to that question. Neither one is proper English.”
He said, “Yeah, the correct answer is ‘are’!”
I said, “‘Bob are going to the peep show?’ No. That doesn’t make sense.”
He said, “Yes it does! Bob IS are going to the peep show!”
I gave up at that point.