NoMethodError and the select form helper

Rails
1

I am trying to create a listing of objects in a table with a drop down
box to edit one particular aspect of each thing in the list , but I can
not even get the form to render without getting a NoMethodError.
Currently I have something like this:

<% for thing in @things %>
//…table stuff here…

<%=h thing.element1 %>
<%=h thing.element2 %>
<%=h thing.element3 %>
//…etc, etc, and then I have the following which give me a
NoMethodError…
<%= select(‘thing’, ‘elementx’, [ ‘choice1’, choice2’],
:selected => thing.elementx ) %>

<% end %>

Of course, once I fix this get the form to actually render, I still
haven’t quite figured out how I would then update all instances of this
object with their (possibly new) values. I assume that I would just
have to iterate through @things and call update_attributes on each
element, but I’m not quite sure how to do that

Sorry if this is a bit of a stupid question, I’m a still learning.

Thanks,
Paul