Text 146, 94 rader
Skriven 2004-11-24 21:27:42 av Aleksej R. Serdyukov (2:5020/24000)
Ärende: teaching horror (by Kate Gladstone) - 3
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Hello, All. The Microsoft has you! If not, you are VERY lucky.

Posted by Kate Gladstone into rec.music.filk on 24.11.2004 20:30 MSK(?)
Subj: "Re: A temptation (TTTO Dane-Geld) v1.1 candidate"
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.)

      Though (count your blessings!) I have as yet experienced/heard no
horror-stories about teachers lying re the
spelling/punctuation/capitalization of the Constitution,

I do have (from a friend) a related tale of woe:
her daughter, in fifth grade, had to write a detailed report on two
famous Americans (randomly assigned by the teacher) and got failing
grades on both reports because she provided correct information which
involved spelling.
     Specifics:
The teacher assigned the girl to write on Noah Webster (producer of the
first American dictionary that did not simply reprint a British
dictionary) and on Theodore Roosevelt (26th American president).

       In reporting on Noah Webster, "Maria" (I've changed her name)
correctly reported that the first and second editions of his
dictionaries had introduced spellings now standard in USA English:
"center" (rather than British "centre"), "color" (rather than British
"colour"), and others now part of the national standard. This part
didn't offend the teacher, as the teacher had known this info which
existed in the school library's only books on Webster (two biographies
written for children).
      The teacher DID, however, feel offended by (and incredulous of)
Maria's further (correct) information that some of Webster's spellings
have by now entered worldwide (and not only USA usage) - because of
Webster, even in the UK they now spell "wagon" (instead of former
"waggon"), "fuel" (instead of former "fewel"), "public" (instead of
former "publick"), etc. (The teacher simply refused to believe - even
when Maria cited /a/ an adult-level general-interest bio of Webster and
/b/ the earlier dictionaries which that biography cited - that anyone or
any dictionary, ANYWHERE, could ever have had "waggon" and "fewel" and
"publick." So, twenty points off for Maria: even when her parents
protested and dragged the Oxford English Dictionary up from the school
library to show that Oxford knows the earlier spellings existed even if
Maria's teacher didn't ... but the teacher did not stop there:
     The teacher took off a further twenty points because Maria
(correctly) noted that the first edition of Webster's dictionary also
had some spellings that teachers/printers/the rest of the public did not
accept when Webster devised or revived them: spellings that the second
edition therefore dropped. Webster first-edition-only spellings (that
the teacher penalized Maria for finding out about) include "aker" (for
"acre"), "soop" (for "soup"), and "wimmen" (for "women"). "How DARE this
child defame the memory of a great man by saying he could have spelled
like that!" Photocopies of first-edition pages, with these spellings
(which Maria included in her report because the books she read about
Webster included these) did not change the teacher's mind. Neither did
quotes, from the same books, of an early Act of Congress that rejected
these spellings while endorsing others (the ones that remain in USA
use.) Anyone, after all, can forge a photocopy or make up a citation
(said the teacher) - how DARE Maria show something "which obviously
could never have been true" just because her source-material came, as
the teacher admitted, from a respectable academic publisher?

The trouble over Teddy Roosevelt (a few months later) involved a similar
matter. In reporting on this oft-controversial president, Maria chose to
mention his efforts to simplify the spelling of certain troublesome
English words. (Teddy drew up a list of 300 words that he wanted to see
simplified - "thorough" to "thoro" ... "catalogue" to "catalog" [this
one actually caught on] ... and 298 others: he wrote a memo that
government offices should spell these 300 words Teddy's way instead of
the dictionaries' way ... but, by and large, government-employees
refused and others ridiculed the notion of change. [A newspaper of the
day printed a caricature of the President kicking a dictionary out of
the White House.) Well, this didn't please the teacher either, despite
(again) reliable sources (this time including the class's own
history-textbook, which the school had newly adopted that year) - how
DARE anyone say that a Great And Wonderful USA President had done
something as childish as complaining about spelling and trying to change
it? So Maria got a zero for that report! Even a letter to the teacher
(at Maria's and her parents' request) from the staff of the Theodore
Roosevelt Birthplace and Museum in New York City did not persuade
Maria's teacher that the girl should not lose credit for getting her
facts right. ("If Teddy Roosevelt or other famous people had ever tried
to change spelling," said the teacher, "surely I would have known about
it. I am a teacher, after all.")

If you don't believe some of the horror-stories I tell about teachers,
talk with Orson Scott Card sometime. One of his sons had a *very*
similar teacher, and various true horrors from that boy's schooldays
made their way into Card's novel LOST BOYS.

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