My English classes are currently suffering from an infestation of sentence fragments. They sneak into their writing, leaving little ‘So’, ’And’, and ‘But’ droppings all over the page. Just last week, six different fragments starting with ‘So’ muddied one unfortunate student’s test essay.
A fondness for fragments has been an ongoing problem all year, and, I’m assuming, the students’ entire writing career. Regardless of how many times we go over eliminating fragments, their extermination abilities have plateaued. As I write ‘fragment.’ for the sixty-seventh time across homework, I am struck with how my students’ quick and dirty writing style reminds me of a square-dance barker.
In an effort to curb their fragment use, I decided to implement a ‘One Haiku per Fragment’ requirement. For every unintentional fragment the student uses in a graded assignment, that student owes me one haiku poem. If they want to write fragments so much, it might as well be a structured assignment. Either my students are going to love poetry after this initiative or scour their work for anything remotely appearing in fragment form.
As I was explaining the new effort today, one of my students instantly perked up at the mention of ‘haiku’.
“Hi-Chew?” he asked enthusiastically.
I simply thought he had mispronounced the type of poem until I remembered that Hi-Chew is the name of a chewy candy here that I jokingly suspect is laced with nicotine considering its popularity.
“No, not Hi-Chew, haiku.”
The beaming face suddenly became crestfallen. For a moment my student thought he would be able to bribe his English teacher with candy. Possibilities abounded.
As much as I love Hi-Chew, come Friday, he will still owe me a notebook worth of haikus with or without a sugar coated lining.
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