Judge Not

My fourth grade teacher couldn’t spell. It had to be more than a bit embarrassing for her, standing in front of the class writing something on the chalkboard, to have a sassy little ten year old call out, “Uh, you spelled that wrong...” She would sigh and erase it and try again. Usually she’d get it right the second time, but if she didn’t one of us would end up spelling it out for her, and she’d get asked, for the umpteenth time, how she passed the tests to become a teacher. She’d reply, seemingly unabashed, that the tests just asked which of the words in a list was spelled incorrectly, and she was pretty good at telling which words were wrong. My classmates and I would exchange doubtful looks, and whisper among ourselves mutinously about the fact that this was the woman whose job it was to test us on our spelling.

I’m not sure if the basic rules of English grammar were drilled into me by someone or if by reading so much they just became ingrained in me. By “basic rules” I mean the difference between “your” and “you’re” and things of that nature; I couldn’t tell you what a comma splice is or probably recognize one if I did see it.

In high school, my boyfriend and I would grab a copy of the “school paper” the second it came out and correct the grammar in it. (“School paper” is in quotes because it was rarely more than the back and front of one 8”x11” page.) This annoyed the members of Journalism class, especially one of my very good friends. We would apologize to her, following it with “we wouldn’t have to do it if you guys had an editor that cared enough to do it!"

When I was a senior, my friends and I made up the staff for the school paper. I took it upon myself on several occasions to place or remove punctuation, change the wording of sentences, and etc. One day the teacher was off doing something important, so we were being passively observed by a substitute. The teacher’s only instruction had been: “Make sure you get the paper out today."

I still get annoyed when I remember what happened that day. The articles were laid out and ready to go, but they were rife with misspellings and needed proofreading.  My goal was to never have anyone going through my paper with a red pen to correct the mistakes I had missed, so I took it on myself to spend the entire hour fixing every mistake I could find. Five minutes before the bell rang, I turned around and found half the class missing, the other half just hanging out. I said to the sub, who was sitting there reading a magazine, “Okay, the paper’s ready to go." She looked at me, puzzled. “But they printed it out at the beginning of class and have already handed it around.” I can’t remember what I did or said, but I can remember exactly how I felt. And I can remember the look on the sub’s face, as if she was in fear for her life. 

The paper that I had spent the whole class period editing had been handed out to the entire school population before I had even started correcting it, and it had my name next to the title: Editor.

I don’t remember anyone asking me how I got to be the editor of the school paper by allowing it to be published with so many obvious mistakes, but if they did I most certainly replied with “No one said anything to me!!!” The final blow came when the teacher returned and was merely pleased that we’d gotten the paper out on time and was unconcerned with the amount of mistakes within. We didn’t reissue the paper with my fixed version, and despite my squawking, nobody got in trouble.

I just hope that none of the fourth graders got ahold of it.