Clouds

When I left the campus about 4:15 this afternoon, I just stopped middle of the driveway to capture the moment -- an explosion in the cotton factory is what it looked like. This was a rare cloud-filled southern California sky with a backdrop of dazzling blue.

When I discuss prepositions in the English classes I teach, I tell my students to remember them by thinking about clouds. They always look at me like I'm crazy. "That's right, " I tell them. A preposition is usually anything you can do to a cloud: you can go over a cloud; under a cloud; through a cloud; around a cloud; beneath a cloud. You can be on a cloud; in a cloud; above a cloud; below a cloud. We are not usually "with" a cloud or "of" a cloud, but those are also prepositions.

Prepositions are important words that my students could care less about, but the cloud example usually helps them to remember that the word preposition has "position" in the middle of it. So if they'll remember "position" and "cloud," they will start to grasp the concept.

Then I explain that a prepositional phrase always ends with a noun or pronoun. So they must also remember that a prepositional phrase never, never,never contains the subject of their sentence, so they should not confuse the noun or pronoun at the end of the prepositional phrase with the subject of their sentence.

And that is about all the instruction they want to hear about sentence structure. So today when I eyed those big fluffy clouds, I should have had preposition words dancing in my thoughts, but I didn't.

Maybe I should send this photo to my students and ask them what that scene makes them think about. I bet very few would reply with the word "prepositions." And the ones that do, they probably need to be English teachers!

Good night from Southern California,
Rosie (& Mr. Fun), aka Carol

P.S. You should have seen those clouds light-up with color as the sun slipped away. "Spectacular" is all I can say; it was just spectacular, but blue sky and bright white clouds were stunning too.