4077 Mothers had a bad day Sunday. Nobody cares.

It always amazes me when I read 'official' press releases from 'educated' people.... and can pick out obvious grammatical errors. I love that parody (inserted, below) about the spell checker. The machine can correct the spelling, but it takes a moderately educated, intelligent, person to correct the word usage.

'Spell Checker Blues'

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rarely ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect in it's weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

Anon

In light of my own horrid grammar and far from perfect spelling, I don't criticize people's writing on a technical level. It is wiser to argue the issues or subject matter.

I remember sitting in my English classes in college, listening to the professor tell me the difference between "there", "their", and "they're".

Thirty years ago that type of instruction, at the college level, was offered in remedial classes only. The major complaint today we hear from college executives is the inordinate amount of money they must spend on remedial instruction. This is not a higher education problem; rather, it speaks to the failure of public secondary education, which standards have been lowered for years. The poor standards in the public secondary school system in this country are a scandal second only to Social Security.

In Colorado, the state has for approx a decade had a test called CSAP to measure students' progress. This testing is very unpopular among the teachers' union. The test has shown essentially no improvement over the last decade especially among urban school districts. So the Democrat-controlled state legislature has a solution: start to dismantle the testing.

"I remember sitting in my English classes in college,..."-cf

You went to college????

And say "anyways"????

If you were skinnier, I'd let it pass, but....

Surely the best way to solve this illiteracy problem is to bequeath the teachers and NEA more taxpayer $$$$.

HughS, in 1972 I took a sophomore level English class at Penn State that fit Cassie's description. I submitted an original essay and was publicly denounced as plagiarizing the material solely based on verbiage. OK, it was too wordy, but I was trying to make a sarcastic point. It went way over the teacher's head. She was the wife of one of the tenured professors, which I believe was her only qualification. The remaining submissions for the quarter were all works I wrote in grade school that I had compulsively saved. They all got A's and B's.

The standards in K-12 education are continually being lowered to meet the quality of the available students... Said quality is a direct reflection on the parents.