From the weekly update Little Bookworm’s teacher sends to parents:
This week for homework, your child is to read thirty minutes each night and record their [sic] reading.
***
The class looked very nice to day [sic] as they [sic] went to see the ballet preform [sic].
I think I’m going to be sick.
UPDATE: A timely cartoon.
Filed under: Education |
Bookworm Room (ARCHIVES) 
Don’t worry Book, just imagine what High School will be like.
OmyGod! That makes me cringe. BW – Will you show this to someone? The teacher? The principal? The board of education? Is this Little Book’s regular teacher? Does this make you want to go back to private schooling? Does LB realize her teacher’s errors in simple spelling and grammar? I’ll bet she’s great on global warming, though.
From a high school English teacher (me): Unfortunately, because of political correctness regarding the use of the pronouns “he” or “his” to refer to the singular noun (the acceptable use now being “he or she” or the horrible s/he), educators and the media have been busy rewriting the rules. I’m afraid you will hear this usage on the nightly news and read it in your newspaper. It doesn’t fly in MY class, but I’m afraid it’s a losing battle.
That was my thought too: that this was not bad grammar but pronoun anxiety, a new phobia, generated by political correctness.
Homeschool?
Grammar is ‘the system of rules implicit in a language, regarded as a mechanism for generating sentences’ and I think that fairly well fits BW’s example and it really was bad grammar . . . but also agree that it fits pronoun anxiety phobia, loved that term, Zhombre.
Sex role anxiety as well, perhaps. If there are no such roles such as female or male, then why even include it in the language, eh?
That is indeed interesting to ponder, Y.
That is such a shoddy and unprofessional communique that it truly does take the breath away.
It is fun to comment on the ‘pronoun anxiety phobia’, but that is only one of the four kinds of mistakes. Being an official message sent to parents, it would have been perfectly fine to say “your child is to read thirty minutes each night and keep a record of his or her reading activity.”
Even an impersonal substitution such as “your child is to read thirty minutes each night and keep a record of the reading activity.” would have been fine.
The use of “to day” instead of “today”, “preform” instead of “perform”, and the use of “their” to reference the class instead of “its”, are three different mistakes entirely that have nothing to do with the “his or her” pronoun problem. It takes the breath away to see all three of those mistakes in one sentence!
Yeah, Mike, right you are, the writing is appalling and shoddy but I was only commenting on the pronoun confusion, not trying to red pencil the whole thing.
Myself, I like pre-formed ballets.
JJ, Does that mean the candidates’ names are already x-ed for your voting convenience?
I am sure the Democrats would happily oblige JJ’s preference for convenience, by marking off his choices for him, Judy, if he asks it of them.
What frightens me is when a teacher has to ask her students how to spell a word like “conscience” or an administrator sends home an informational letter with grammar errors. One condolence form-letter, given to students two years ago after another student died in a car crash, had six (we counted) spelling and grammar errors. It also failed to mention the student’s name.
Counting down the days ’til I can get out of there . . .
A bit of a cheap shot. Most teachers aren’t particularly literate. I think this has more to do with how rare literacy is than any particular deficiency in teachers. Besides, how literate do you have to be to teach elementary school kids?
If your goal is to only hire teachers who can write beautifully framed letters to parents, you can probably find someone who’ll do that.
More alarming to me is the emphasis on documenting and quantifying everyone’s reading activity. Ask yourself if writing down everything your read would encourage or discourage you from reading.
Brian,
Considering that these are the teachers who are charged with teaching my children basic reading and writing, I expect them to have mastered basic reading and writing. I’m not asking for Shakespeare, but I am asking for some demonstration that the teacher grasps simple grammatical principles and is able to proofread a paper well.
As to the latter point, I’m assuming, perhaps foolishly, that this teacher does know how to spell these basic words, she simply doesn’t bother to make sure that her short little messages to parents are reasonably correct. This is disappointing. Proofreading isn’t a silly skill for a teacher. This same teacher routinely mis-grades my child’s homework, marking him down for things done correctly, or failing to correct manifest errors. In other words, the letter she sent to parents is a sterling example of failings she’s demonstrated in other areas.
I re-read the comments and I must say that people seem to get a remarkable amount of mileage from a few spelling and grammar errors.
The only people who think proof reading has much to do with teaching writing are people who are good at proof reading.
Nothing about writing is basic. Its the hardest thing kids learn how to do in elementary school. If your daughter can write in complete sentences and tell a coherent story, she’s doing great.
If she misspells a half dozen words, she’ll spell better next year. You would mark her paper up and have her study all the words she misspells? You are teaching her to limit her vocabulary to those words that she is sure she can spell.
It sounds like your daughter likes to read and write. If the school doesn’t make her write down whatever she reads, and you don’t mark up whatever she writes, she’ll continue to enjoy exploring literacy.
I proofread this sentence as I wrote it.
Brian Levine does make a good point about students limiting their vocabulary to the words that they KNOW they know how to spell. I remember doing that myself, when I was in school.
But proofreading should be a natural skill for any educated person. You should sense something wrong while reading a passage with a mistake, even if you cannot see it exactly for what it is at first. It should sound ‘awkward’ to you.
My grammar is not very good, especially my spoken grammar, but when I read something that I wrote, I can STILL pick up mistakes, even though I sometimes leave them in place, because of time constraints, their being minor, or their being ‘realistic dialog’, or just because, in some cases, the proper phrase is ‘awkward’.
That ‘weekly update’ is unforgivable!