City education officials have demoted an elementary school principal days after a school board member circulated a photo showing misspellings in a large announcement sign outside one of the building’s entrances.
The sign at School 20’s side entrance listed events for “Dicember 2014.” It alerted people to the date for “progress reepor” and had the numeral one placed backwards in another instance.
Officials said the sign apparently contained those errors for more than a week, but apparently no one noticed until city school board member Corey Teague distributed copies of a photo of the errors.
“If this is how the administration takes care of signage how can we expect the students to do better? We must be held to a higher standard,” wrote Teague in an email accompanying the photo.
Here's the sign, taken from
the full article:
Given the way reading and writing are taught, this may be acceptable. It looks like the way they taught Whole Language when my son was in elementary. Not that it's right, but it is what it is.
ReplyDeleteIf this was the whole reason, yes, it's nuts. However, usually there is a lot more going on behind the scenes for which this might have been the last straw.
ReplyDeleteDid anyone bother to ask whether they had run out of e's and were making do with the letters they had?
Given the context, sure.
ReplyDeleteIt's a school district so graduating illiterates or hiring them is only a problem if it becomes public knowledge and thus embarrassing. Otherwise, no big deal right?
On a visit to our son's 2nd-grade class I noticed a poster the teacher had created to help students with spelling, specifically words with "silent" letters. Among those words were these: "shariff" and "lemonaide". I presume the teacher meant "sheriff" and "lemonade". What really drew my attention, though, was that the final "f" in the first word and the "e" in the second word had been highlighted to show that those were the silent letters.
ReplyDeleteThis wasn't the only experience of this sort. We had similar issues with other teachers and other school districts. What is the appropriate tack to take when you have one of these encounters?
That reminds me of one my favorite examples of sign fails (as featured on Instapundit).
ReplyDeleteThis was taken at the University of Washington in 2010, during "Grammar Week" (whatever that was):
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/uwashstudprotest030410.jpg
You make the correction. I always do when I see something wrong on the board in someone's room--nobody *wants* to be wrong.
ReplyDeleteThis was up for days? I'm agree with getting rid of the principal. It's too much like that illiterate school board member in Detroit.
as long as were all on the OCD track, the 1 in 31 on the bottom line is backwards...
ReplyDeleteI seriously doubt that the principal was out there putting up the letters on the signs. That said, where was the rest of the staff on this, if it was up for a week? The first thing I would have done as a teacher there would have been to tell the principal that he had an horribly misspelled sign … but, it's easy to take things for granted. Unless this is a pattern, this shouldn't have even warranted a letter in his file.
ReplyDeleteThe principal did nothing about this for a week. Let me channel my internal Al Gore here: It's time...for him...to go.
ReplyDeleteIt could be worse. Detroit's former school board president, Otis Mathis, was barely literate, couldn't compose a proper sentence, had to read some things two or three times to get the point, and tried to sue to have writing proficiency dropped from Wayne State's graduation requirements so he would be able to graduate.
ReplyDeleteEventually, sexual improprieties got him out of office, not the absurdity of having an illiterate as head of the school board.
http://www.joannejacobs.com/2010/03/detroit-school-board-leader-cant-write/
A demotion is over the line. This warrants a talking-to. And to the rest of the staff.
ReplyDeleteI'm troubled by the decision because my old school had something like this happen a few years ago. A new assistant principal was put in charge of the outside board and told the new head custodian what to put on the sign. Unfortunately, the head custodian was not a native English speaker (or reader) and made a couple of errors when he put the letters up. We got it fixed in about 30 minutes -- but we certainly could have been on the receiving end of the sort of crap this school is getting. The new policy put in place was for the new message to be written out and handed to the head custodian in the future.
ReplyDeleteThe difference is that your sign was up for minutes, not days.
ReplyDeleteWhich is why the entire staff is just as culpable as the principal.
ReplyDeleteThe entire staff isn't in charge.
ReplyDelete