It's entirely possible she got a lousy education as a child, but that doesn't excuse her becoming a teacher. She knew she couldn't spell, she knew that her own grammar was lacking, she shares a large portion of the blame for her becoming a teacher.
How many people failed in her story? Certainly she did, as seemingly did her K-12 teachers and university professors. Whatever England's system is for credentialing teachers, it certainly let an elephant slip through the cracks.
I'm not able to say who owns exactly what percentage of the fault for this woman's becoming a teacher, but I can't help but find her sorta-mea-culpa in the linked column to be one big, lousy, attention-grabbing excuse.
I don't understand why she didn't try to learn the material. I was in the same boat--was never taught any grammar--but I made efforts to learn. I put my own kids through the best grammar program I could find and I learned it too. Now I know what a transitive verb is. Why didn't she just make a study of grammar and spelling?
ReplyDeleteI felt we should cut her a little slack for her SPOKEN English gaffes, but then I read the rest of her story and I couldn't understand why she kept going in her educational training if she knew she didn't have mastery of the subject. There's a lot of buck-passing going on there in that thick bureaucracy...
ReplyDeleteI'll give leeway, to a certain extent, on spoken word ... although I have a few errors that make me cringe (I feel badly instead of I feel bad, women voters instead of female voters, and using myself when it isn;t reflexive and should be 'me') but if you're a teacher? You should be modeling good grammar all the time --- unless it's CLEAR that you're being colloquial. I still have nightmare images of my high school, very white, English teacher trying to do Twain's brilliant Negro dialect ... it wasn't blackface, but it was close.
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