Johanna's reminder to me that my course may attract students
with a variety of motivations and abilities takes me back to
when I taught high school Latin.  The courses tended to attract
the kinds of students whom I've described, but there were also those
who seemed to have a great deal of difficulty catching on to what
the study of language was all about.  They were often very
frustrated, tended to view what we were doing as abstract at the
same time that I felt it was concrete.  Ideally I will have
a class large enough to be permittied to exist, but small
enough (8-12 students) to allow everyone to jump right in with
the trials and tribulations as well as the triumphs.
 
        Was it this group that was sharing some interesting
nouns-used-as verbs a few months ago?  The exchange made me
more conscious of the prevalence of this and I had to smile
recently when a colleague announced that she would not be at
a meeting because she would be maid of honoring at her sister's
wedding.
 
Emily