Gerunds 101

http://leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com/2009/06/bullies-complaining-about-bullies.html

Bart, who is gay, had gay students' telling him they wanted to commit suicide because of the bullying they endured in the schools.

This is obviously ridiculous. What would one do here?

Bart had gay students tell him they wanted to commit suicide.

That's right; no apostrophe. "Tell" functions as a verb. "Telling" functions as a participle.

>Since this school was in Olson's district, I wrote her to complain about this teacher with his Bible's torturing the gay student.<

This is just as stupid. The Bible obviously wasn't doing any torturing.

>Nor did she fulfill a promise to Bart Birdsall to attend to a gay student being bullied at the time when she was sending out asinine emails to people complaining about a teacher with a Bible on his desk torturing a gay boy by telling him he would land in hell for being gay.<

See? Is it the desk's torturing? A teacher's torturing? Could she be bothered following her own stupid rules?

She could have nearly argued the first one, but she's illiterate, so she missed it.


>I am never one to suffer obnoxious public servants in silence. I wrote back to La Olson with one of my crisper rebukes and called the principal. She stopped the teacher from torturing the student and made him remove the Bible from his desk, good administrator that she was.

Suddenly, bullying is getting not only local but national attention, and things are looking up for abused children. This is no thanks to board members like Ms. Olson who has sat on the board forever and never raised a finger to intervene, although she promised Bart Birdsall that she would.<

This is bizarre. Olson never intervenes, but she intervened when the teacher was torturing the student. This is flawed.

Ms. Olson, Dr. Lamb, and Ms. Kurdell, all on the board when Dr. Lennard and his two ghouls Hamilton and Davis, were systematically torturing Mr. Erwin, trying to run him crazy, claiming his was crazy, trying to fire him, and trying to deprive him of his pension until Mr. Erwin shut them down with the jury's help in his Whistleblower suit against the board.

Another comma would have offset "Hamilton and Davis". This one comma separates the verb from its subject. There is no excuse for this one. As Vinegartits writes, "You don’t have “personal choices” in where to put punctuation, Sugarbritches. You either [sic] put the commas in the right place, or you are illiterate."

I wish her granddaughter luck with her teaching career. I hope that grammar hypocrisy isn't hereditary.