In Which I Am Embarrassed By My Public School English Language Education
1993 - 3rd Grade: You stood there at the chalkboard and shot down my offer that will not contracts to won’t. Then you proceeded to write would not on the board and cross out the U L D and O to “prove” that won’t is a contraction of would not. This is not to mention you did this directly beneath where you had already shown that would not contracts to wouldn’t.
1993 - 4th Grade: The correct response to “How do you spell possess?” is not “I don’t know.” Neither is it hazarding three different guesses before consulting the dictionary. You may have just been a substitute teacher, but you must have had some credentials, right?
1997-1998 - 8th Grade Language Arts: Tomorrow has no A, two Rs, and one M. Monkey has one E, not two, and yes, that is a Y at the end. Other skills you lack and may need help in correcting: application of deodorant to armpits.
1999 - 10th Grade English: I gazed perplexedly at the scrawling in the periphery of my thesis: “Good use of thesaurus.” Was this patronage, compliment, or utter ignorance from the instructor? Is it perennially assumed that pupils are incapable of provision of synonyms without lexical aids?
2001 - 11th Grade English: “NSW” is not just an acronym for New South Wales, it also means “No Such Word”, which you wrote next to my usage of forwent. That means either you don’t know the past tense form of forgo, or you don’t know the word forgo.
2002 - College English 1A: Patent means “obvious, clear to see, opposite of latent”. As in, “It’s patent that the English teacher doesn’t know the meaning of the word patent, and without looking up whether or not the word was used correctly, decided to write ‘correct usage?’ next to it in the student’s paper.”
