I am slowly going crazy, 6 5 4 3 2 1...

Are public school students taught grammar and punctuation anymore? Because I am a T.A. I am reading and marking student essays, and I am amazed by the random acts of violence against adjectives, verb tenses, and punctuation of all kinds being perpetrated by our students.

The apostrophe abuse alone is horrifying, but when combined in the same paragraph with both present-tense verbs and past-tense verbs, a period outside the quotation marks, the excessive use of adjectives...*sigh* Pray that I will be charitable in my comments, and that I retain my sanity until next Wednesday afternoon (the end of exams and my fiancé's arrival for a visit).