Selena is our granddaughter. She is in the fourth grade and we recently attended her spring music concert.
It is a tradition at their house to have a post-concert celebration at Dairy Queen and feast on an ice cream treat of each person’s choice. I look forward to that tradition and since a hot fudge, marshmallow sundae is my favorite treat I dream about it from the beginning to the end of every concert I attend.
Selena would be celebrating a birthday in several days so her Mother decided to pick up an ice cream cake while we were enjoying our frozen treats.
That’s when I had the opportunity of observing an old fashioned ‘spell check’ occur. You see the ice cream cake needed to be personalized by having Selena’s name added to it.
The young man working behind the counter came over to our booth with pen and paper in hand to make sure he would be spelling Selena’s name correctly. As a retired school teacher and author who values correct spelling I was very impressed. 🙂
As we were preparing to leave the young man approached with the personalized cake and we all looked in horror as we saw that Selena’s name had been changed to ‘Sclena’. The spell check had failed!
It seems the lady in back who handled the frosting lettering had never seen the name Selena before and took it upon herself to change her name to Sclena.
No one had the heart to point out the minor letter change so Selena celebrated her tenth birthday as Sclena!
With modern technology it’s difficult to misspell a word. The misspelled word is automatically changed or a red line under the word warns you of an incorrect spelling. It was not that way for most of my life.
When I was a child doing my homework and needed a word correctly spelled my first action was to holler, “Mom!” Of course being that my Mom had been a country school teacher for several years she quickly introduced me to the dictionary.
Remember the dictionary? It was a hard covered book with all the words of the English language organized alphabetically in it. It worked really well unless you needed to spell a word that you had not the slightest hint how it began. Oh, how ‘spell check’ would have been appreciated then! 🙂
When I was in fourth grade I experienced a ‘spell check’ moment that has weighed on my conscience ever since the moment it happened. I think it’s time to unburden myself of the guilt.
Our teacher Ms. Peterson would give us a spelling test every Friday. She gave us the spelling words at the beginning of the week so we could study and be prepared when test time rolled around.
I loved spelling and I studied the new words during the week so I was always prepared for the test except for that one Friday when Ms. Peterson said spell ‘just’.
My mind was blank. I panicked! What letter does ‘just’ start with?
My classmate Maureen was sitting in the desk in front of me and I didn’t mean to, it just happened so fast, I glanced at Maureen’s paper. And there I saw j-u-s-t scrawled on her test paper. I knew it was the wrong way to do a ‘spell check’ but I did it anyway.
Immediate guilt settled over me!
But it didn’t end there. Once the test was complete I raised may hand and told my teacher, “Ms. Peterson, that word ‘just’ was hard for me to spell. So I sounded it out and was able to spell it correctly.”
Besides cheating I told a lie on top of it all! 🙁
Maureen if you happen to read this blog I would like to extend my sincere apology to you for stealing your spelling of the word ‘just’ sixty-five years ago. I am sorry!
There I feel a whole lot better after that long over due confession. Blog writing can be good for the soul.
In today’s technological society we don’t even have to spell out words any more. We can just speak into the computer or iPhone and the spelling is done for us.
Those lucky fourth graders of today will never have to carry “spelling guilt” around with them for the rest of their lives like I did. But then they will never have to walk two miles to school up hill both ways either.
Until next time.
