‘I’ Before ‘E’, Except After Some Idiots Who Didn’t Proofread

Last week, a friend handed me a packet from her daughter’s first grade teachers which contained a sweet little assignment. [Kid] was going to be the ‘Super Star’ of her class for the week of February 12th and was instructed to compile a little booklet of interesting things about herself.

“Look at the photos [kid] chose to use, they’re so cute!”

Because I’m the indulgent sort (and this particular six-year-old is my BFF and I love her), I gave the photos and drawings and whatnot a cursory flick-though, but what caught my eye IMMEDIATELY was a glaringly obvious error on the first page of the packet — you know, the one containing the instructions for the assignment. From the teachers. Notice I say teachers. This class has two teachers who split the week. Two teachers. That’s twice the opportunity to spot things like typos on materials being sent home to parents.

One error by one teacher I would excuse. We’re only human, after all. But once I spotted the first error, I went on the hunt and turned up oh, so many more!

I would like to point out that the people who generated and distributed the instruction page for this task are both credentialed teachers. These are the people we entrust with the education of future generations. If this is the quality of work they’re sending home to the parents, we can only assume that the instruction they are providing to the vulnerable little minds they oversee every day is of the same caliber — in this case, not good.

Allow me to elucidate. The errors include the following:

Spelling/Incorrect word usage:

• “Supper Star” rather than “Super Star”
• This was the big one that sent me down the rabbit hole.
• “mourning” rather than “morning”
• I’ll lay odds that first-graders aren’t dropping like flies and necessitating a daily moment of silence at the start of class.

Singular/plural discrepancies:

• “Your child may bring a favorite book, special award or mementos, and one favorite toy.”
• ‘award or memento’ or ‘awards or mementos’ One or the other, all singular or all plural. You can’t have one of each!
• “Your child may draw pictures, use photographs or magazines pictures to complete the attached pages.”
• ‘magazines pictures’? No.
• Also, this sentence as a whole is awkwardly structured and needs to be revised…

Other errors of note:

• Continuation of underlining of text to include the period at the end of a sentence.
• Period incorrectly enclosed within quotation marks.
• Missing apostrophe — “...it is [city] Unified School Districts rule that…”, should be District’s. It is the rule of the school district, and therefore possessive.
• Missing Oxford comma. This is, of course, a formatting choice. However, the Oxford comma is regularly used throughout the rest of the document, therefore for the sake of consistency it should be employed at all times.
• I could also mention the fact that a deadline for the assignment is given, however, it is not appropriately specific. The instructions, dated 01/26/2018 (a Friday), state that the “packet should be completed and brought to school by Monday.” (There’s that underline I found annoying.) Excuse me, but do you mean Monday the 29th, the Monday following the issuance of this assignment? Or Monday the 12th of February, the first day of the week that [kid] is scheduled to be the class “Super Star” as noted at the beginning of this sheet of instructions? Specificity, people!

That’s a total of ten errors in a 324-word document, written and looked over by two credentialed instructors.

Personally, I find this appalling. The simple fact that these teachers think it’s acceptable to send out first-draft-quality anything in the first place is grating, but since it’s happening I find myself fervently hoping that it’s the result of laziness rather than ignorance. Dear holy heck, please tell me these teachers are aware that they’ve made errors, and would be aware of what those errors were once confronted with them. Please. Otherwise I may have an actual coronary.
 
The thing I find even more appalling, though, is that no one is calling these teachers on their shit. If my child were to bring home something as poorly composed as this from their teacher, you’d better believe I’d be red-penning the fuck out of it, sending it back, and CC-ing the administration.* These are the people we send our youth to for six hours a day in the hope that some of their (presumed) knowledge will rub off on the little ankle-biters. We have to trust that these people know what they’re doing, and when it appears that they don’t, something needs to be said. No one but the teachers benefit from being complacent about this sort of thing. They half-ass everything and collect a paycheck, and we end up with poorly educated progeny. Something is very wrong with this picture.

I asked my friend if she was planning on calling the teachers on the carpet about the quality of this particular set of instructions, knowing full well that she spotted most of the same things I did. She was shocked that I would even think of doing something like that.**

So, here I sit, being livid on her behalf, and on behalf of her daughter and the rest of her class who are being taught by a pair of incompetents.

Parents: Read the stuff your kids bring home. Really, truly read it. Don’t let this kind of thing happen on your watch! Your kids deserve better.

Teachers: Proofread. Edit. Get a second set of eyes. The kids deserve a teacher who knows what they’re doing. You look like a complete moron when you send things out with blatant errors. Also, you’re damned lucky I don’t have any kids, because I’d be the first one to blow a gasket about something like this.




*My mother did this with shocking frequency during my school years, and at some point I started to do it myself. Yeah, I was that kid.
**Ultimately, my friend did circle “Supper” and “mourning” before sending the kiddo back with her homework. I still wish she had let me send back my edits, but never mind...