We’re just sitting here typing papers (I’m done, so I’m wasting time here) when my English teacher just yelled out “All your paragraphs better have topic sentences, or you will die!!” :eek: :eek:
I was scared, anyway.
It’s beer minus 3 hours.
If he starts murdering call the cops or something.
Or whatever
Death by nontopical sentences, eh? Sounds fitting for an English class.
Ah! My child, you have just discovered one of the many ways that we English teachers have of motivating our students… 
What are you doing surfing the SDMB? You have homework to do, don’t you? GET CRACKING!
Looms over your desk brandishing a ruler
AHHH! :eek: I’m cracking Astroboy, I’m cracking!!
Somehow I don’t believe you and the rest of the angels were just sitting there quietly typing your papers.
Tell your fellow students to settle the hell down, and stop freaking out your poor teacher. It’s Friday forchrissakes.
But keep us updated. 
By the way, your teacher is correct.
If you continually write papragraphs witout topic sentances, you will not get a passing grade in the class.
You will not graduate from High School, and when you try and write things, people will laugh at you and not give you a job.
Then you will be uneducated, laughed at, unemployed, homeless and addicted to crack, and then you will die.
Actually, we we’re being pretty good. . .just one little argument over whether or not a cheerleader should mend her jacket because it’s too big. But, I don’t see how they could make a jacket too big for her. 
Anyway, we’re all still alive at the moment. . .but then again, none of us has turned in a paper yet.
Pfft, one of my history teachers used to threaten us with death and beatings all the time. On several occasions he threatened me personally with bodily harm if I couldn’t answer the question correctly within twenty seconds. He’d regularly put one of my friends in a headlock just for the fun of it. He made it very clear that it was HIS class, and that he was allowing us to exist in it because it amused him. He was one of the best teachers I ever had.
I’ve had teachers threaten me all the time.
Then again they were in radio isotope labs or virology 
So the death threats were more along the lines of, “Dumbass do that and die, just don’t kill the rest of us!”
And you’ll have to live in a van by the river!
Topic sentences are important. Try to make them long and Faulkner-esque.
Former English professor checking in:
If you had to grade the 8 years of papers (average 75 students per year, 5 papers per semester) and see the number of paragraphs that looked like they were written by the latest SDMB out-sick-from-junior-high-troll, you too would fly into a homocidal rage. Be happy that your class is advanced enough that topic sentences are important. I’ve taught classes where a large portion of the students couldn’t figure out how to spell-check. I’ve taught classes where the mere concept of stringing together two related thoughts was beyond the pale, let alone three or more organized by topic.
Sales is a bitch, but it beats teaching.
My algebra teacher used to threaten us on a regular basis. It was great, he was so funny. Well, I thought so. Everyone else was kind of scared. But for some reason he just cracked me up.
My favorite was when he would say, “Every day I tell you to go away. And every day, you come back!!” And he would crack his yardstick on my desk and yell my last name. And I would bust up, and I wonder if he thought that my reaction was funny or just weird?
I guess teachers have to amuse themselves somehow–I certainly would.
Do a preemptive strike and kill him/her first.
:rolleyes:
I’m surprised a former English professor must resort to epithets, but perhaps the sales profession has dulled your vocabulary.
Despite my dislike of that sort of language, I think that would make a marvelous autosignature quote.
You have a wimp for an English teacher.
The proper approach is to collect the papers and begin reading them aloud. For the first paper in which a paragraph is found missing a topic sentence, the teacher should summarily shoot the offender, hand back the papers, and demand that they be re-written correctly.
Threats are lame. Action is what is required.
SHUT your FLAN-HOLE.
As another former English professor, let me add, “Hear, hear.” I had students–COLLEGE students–who didn’t know what quotation marks are. Who didn’t know what a “noun” is. Who thought “ain’t” was acceptable in academic writing (and occasionally misspelled it). I could go on.
And Ziactrice, sales really is a bitch.
JimSox5, get back to work. And when you get to college, DO NOT major in English. A minor in it is acceptable.
I found English majors thought it was their job to produce overlong, tedious stories about 40ish addicts of some kind sitting in a room smoking after their latest binge for 20 pages. Or horribly awkward sex scenes. Academics should not write porn.
That’s why I switched to psychology. It might be a useless major, but psych majors throw the best parties.
Just an update. . .I had five topic sentences for five paragraphs (they even learnt me how to count :p) and I had five quotes, all of them parathetically documented. And I got an A.
I am in a very good mood now.