The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

Today the students in first grade at Junior High School were learning their ‘negatives’.  At the beginning of the term they were each issued with the dreaded ‘drill book’ containing numerous sentences that either have chunks missing from them that they have to fill in, or sentences that are jumbled that they have to put into the correct order. 

Today, the page that the students were reading was a series of jumbled up sentences. 

Each student was required to read aloud one sentence.  Students took several minutes to work out the correct order and confidently voice their answers.  Various voices were heard one by one offering up responses such as 'I don't play tennis' or 'They don't study Maths' etc.  This was seemingly going well and the teacher looked pleased with the students’ progress.  That is until the final sentence on the page.  The boy whose turn it was, obviously had not been paying attention the entire time, as he looked up and asked the teacher in Japanese, ‘What number?’.  The teacher responded in English with ‘14’.  He looked down at his book then raised his head to ask, again in Japanese, ‘What page?’.  The teacher patiently answered him again in English with ‘43’.  He flipped through a few pages until he got to page 43 and once again looked up, with no trace of embarrassment whatsoever, to inquire after the question number again.  This time half of the class screamed out, ’14!’.  Concentrating hard, he looked down at the jumbled sentence, worked out the correct order then very quietly uttered, ‘I don’t speak English.’. 

I burst out laughing.  You don’t say.  Hardly a confidence boosting sentence to unjumble in English class now is it?  Who writes this stuff?