I’m one of those parents who throws a FIT if one of my children brings home a note from school that has spelling and/or grammatical errors in it. This should NOT happen. These people are teaching MY children – and yours, too! There are so many tools that can be used to check spelling and grammar — but, they are not infallible. Just sitting down and actually reading what you wrote could possibly save a teacher or school from a critical parental letter from me!
On Saturday, my hubster was a judge for the Junior Ag Mechanics show (notice, that is not shown as possessive – according to the powers that be for the event – who are ALL educators). I toodled around with his judging group, acting as a gopher, photographer and all-around entertainment … just because I’ve been busy with kids for so many years that I never got to enjoy some of the extracurricular activities that my husband attended.
But, I was stopped in my tracks by the following sign, that was on a number of exhibits from a particular school (I have removed the school’s name, to protect the innocent):
Do you see what I see? At first, I just walked around the sign, to make sure I was seeing what I thought I saw. Then, I asked the collegiate FFA assistant that was assisting my husband’s group if she thought that “tomorrows” should be possessive. Heck, she’s a graduating college student, surely she would have taken English 101 and would know. ummm, not so much. Then, I asked a judge or two what he thought – just because it was DRIVING. ME. NUTS. All of the judges in our group are well-educated and work, in some way or another, in an ag-related field – two actually holding teaching certificates in our great state of Texas. I didn’t expect them to be as retentive as I was about this egregious error…but, I did expect them to know the difference between whether a word was possessive or not. Not so much there, either.
But, it still made me whip my neck around every time I saw a sign that was missing an apostrophe!
As we were leaving the building, I came upon another sign from the same school:
Ahhh. I felt so much better. Except for the fact that half of their signs were WRONG – and their teachers that were attending the event with them should be forced to personally fix every single sign that had errors. With paintbrushes. Held with their teeth. And then, their photos should appear on a shameful teacher website for allowing their students to show up to such a prestigious event with signs that were grammatically incorrect. Shame on them.