Speling Mistaks Lead to Resillency

Sometimes hard work doesn’t pay off

I guess spelling doesn’t really matter anymore. Almost everything is written electronically where almighty Google corrects the mistake immediately as we type, often without the author noticing. At worst, the error is underlined and all one has to do is click on the corrected version to edit the work. I bet there are a lot of millennial poor spellers out there and they don’t even know it. 

As a Gen X-er, correct spelling was as important in school as learning our “times tables”. Spelling was not only a verb but the name of one of our subjects. Spelling and phonics was taught regularly and we had a weekly spelling test. It was considered so important that, when I reached High School, marks were deducted from our exams and essays for spelling and grammar. If memory serves me well, it was half a mark per mistake up to 15% of the total percent. So potentially, a mark of 80% could be reduced to a final mark of 65% if one did not spell correctly. Some teachers defied the policy and if a word was spelled incorrectly, just simply marked it wrong which could amount to a larger loss than 15%. 

I sucked at spelling.

As a result, my average marks did not reflect my knowledge or skill, let alone the hours I spent studying. I found it demoralizing. One year, I took a World Issues Geography class. We had to memorize all the rivers in Canada, all the capital cities around the world, all the World Heritage Sites and all the countries in the world. Just think of Africa alone! First of all, it seemed the countries changed names frequently as borders shifted and secondly, as a first language English speaker, I found the spelling of said countries difficult to master. 

I studied so hard for the test where we had to correctly label all the countries of the world. The night before the test, I sat on the living room couch with my mother who quizzed me incessantly (BTW, I spelled that incorrectly just now and my computer changed it without my prompt!). By midnight, I was nailing it! She would point to the map and I could shout out the country without a pause. I actually could hardly wait for Geography class! I could smell success. 

During the test, I wrote the answers as quickly as I could for fear that the information would slip out of my brain. My self talk was encouraging.

“YESSSS! Know that one!”
“Easy! Paraguay.”
“Yup, Bulgaria”.
“Papua New Guinea”.
“Kay, now Africa.”

On the back of the question paper, I scribbled some of the mnemonics I invented to help me remember.

“All Ladies Equally Need Charm”.
Aleria-Libya-Egypt-Niger-Chad”.
And so it went. I was on a roll! 

I handed my test in with such confidence. It felt so good to know my hard work had paid off. 

The next day I was so excited to get my results back. It was the last period of the day. The teacher stood at the front of the classroom and expressed how disappointed he was with the overall class average. He said it was very clear that most of the students had not put forth the effort to prepare for the test. I was hardly listening because it didn’t apply to me. I had aced the test. 

After his stern chastisement, the teacher explained that he had put a pile of tests in order of highest mark to lowest mark and would be handing them out in that order. I knew I would not be one of the high marks on top but figured I would hear my name called about 5 in. 

“Heather, MacDonald, Herbie Wong, Randy Woods…”
Okay, here comes mine. 
“Jennifer Yang”. 
What? 
“Jeff Nethercott”.
Huh???

And so it continued as knives poked my heart with each descending name. I squeezed my throat hard to avoid the embarrassment of crying. Eventually my name reverberated in my ears. I considered not going to the front to claim my work. But that would draw attention to me even more so I sauntered to the front, trying to look like I didn’t care while my face tingled red. 

I ran straight home (Yes, Gen Ys. Our parents did not pick us up from school) barged in the door bawling. Between sobs, I explain to Mom my humiliation. 

Allow me to step back for a second and make sure you understand my Mom’s gentle, mild nature. My teatotalling mom was a peace-maker in our home and our community. She was shy to speak up, was hailed as a listener and gave people all the concessions in the world, believing that all are inherently good and rarely intentionally do harm. If you have followed other blog posts where I present my mother (Messages from Indigo and Mother’s Day Challenge), you will concur that the ending of my story was uncharacteristic.

Without explanation, my mother left the living room, left the house, slamming the door. She lept into the car and squealed down the road toward the school. 

She returned home about half an hour later and finished cooking supper. 

The next day in Geography class, the teacher sheepishly stood in front of the class and apologized for handing out the tests in such a public way. 

“I am very sorry. I was so upset that the class average was so low that, in haste, and without thinking it through, I handed the tests back in descending order. I thought the marks reflected a lack of care by you, the students, and I have since come to realize that there may have been other factors that caused the lower class average.” 

Wow. He ate crow. I couldn’t imagine how it looked but I figured my Mom had something to do with the apology. When I asked her about it at supper, with a petite smile, she said, “Even your mother can get angry. I just pick my battles”. 

I felt really proud of my Mother. 

My Dad, who is much more assertive (see the blog post I wrote about him for father’s day) smiled at me. We both felt proud of Mom that day. 

I am learning all about resilience by sorting out my thoughts on my blog, “Plan B is Better” (planbisbetter.com). I have learned that starting over can be brave, that trusting “this too shall pass” is a good strategy, that hard work doesn’t always pay off. Mom did not fight for my mark to be changed. She was able to see that something more important was worth fighting for. She immerged from that parent-teacher meeting with her dignity intact and I with mine. 

I didn’t fail the course. Even though I worked hard, I could be better. I could also learn to spell the countries correctly.

I signed up to take the course again. That’s resilience. 

Thanks, Mom. 

ADDENDUM

Times Tables refers to the process of memorizing all the multiplication from 1X1 to 12X12. 

I invite you to count the intentional spelling mistakes in this post and use your times table to figure out how many marks would be deducted if this was an essay in 1983. 

Post your calculations! Let’s see who gets it right! 

P.S. Grammar was a whole other issue! Perhaps that’s another post. I am aware of intentional grammatical mistakes in this piece designed in the name of poetic license for the stake of informal style and appeal. For any of my former students reading this… never EVER start a sentence with ‘And’ in formal writing! Use “However”.