Cyber Inspiration

As a teacher (for the record, a very young and generally well-liked teacher, so I can’t be accused of the strict, jaded, old stuffy stereotype), I’d have to agree with this.  The amount of grammatical errors you see in kids’ work would make your brain cry.  You can tell when a student is trying, and when they’re just rushing and being careless.  From experience, I’d say the ONLY way to make kids care about learning to write is to hold them accountable for it and make their mistakes affect them.

But, you know, if you want to teach them that whining about having the right to be sloppy will get them what they want out of life, then go for it.  We might already be too close to the dock at the end of Shit’s Creek anyway in that respect.

thedailywhat:

Grammar School of the Day: A school in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, is stirring up some mixed feelings toward a new policy that allows students only five grammatical errors per writing assignment.

“Students and parents were somewhat shocked to hear these changes,” wrote a Summit Christian Academy student reporter. ”The immediate reaction from the student body was that the changes were too harsh.”

Per the new policy, students who have more than five errors will be forced to rewrite their paper, and their top possible score will be capped at 75%.

“We have some who are thrilled and others who are highly concerned because it’s tied to scholarship dollars,” the academy’s principal, Kim Gill, told Romenesko.

“One concession we’ve made is if it’s the same error that’s repeated in the paper, the teacher has the disgression [sic] to say, for example, I’m going to take these five run-on sentences and count them as one error.”

Disgression? See me after class.

[romenesko.]