<p>I have the official PSAT practice test from 2010 in front of me, and there’s a writing question that makes no sense to me.</p>
<p>Not carefully watching the clock, there was not enough time for the teacher to explain|||||clearly the assignment for the following week. No error.</p>
<p>The answer is A. I put no error, and I can’t see why A is not grammatically correct. Is it something to with misplaced modifiers/dangling modifiers?</p>
<p>Formatting is a little off 
Anyways, “Not carefully watching the clock” is describing the teacher, and therefore should be followed by “,the teacher”. Since that cant be done, Choice A is incorrect and needs to be changed.</p>
<p>“Not carefully watching the clock” needs to precede the phrase that it modifies. For instance you can say:
Not carefully watching the clock, my mom did not take the cookies out of the oven soon enough. D:</p>
<p>But you cannot say: not carefully watching the clock, the cookies were not taken out of the oven soon enough - as this implies that the cookies are watching the clock.</p>
<p>Pertaining to this specific question, “not carefully watching the clock” is modifying the time that the teacher has, and not the teacher itself. A correct way of wording this would be: Because she did not carefully watch the clock, there was not enough time… etc.</p>
<p>Or even to follow with my previous example but not this particular question it would be correct to write: “Not carefully watching the clock, the teacher did not have enough time to…”</p>