Curse of the English teacher

From their first classroom onward, the teacher is cursed.

I realized my curse one evening as a still-wet-behind-the-ears teacher in northern New Mexico. Three young boys careened their sting-ray bikes off the curb and into my VW’s path. Slamming on the brakes, I screeched to a halt and leaped from the driver’s seat.

“Boys!” I commanded. “Come here!”

From my perch behind my opened door, I lectured on the virtues of safety and precaution to those three urchins as if they were my very own. I was, in common vernacular, “in their face.” I shut my door, ground my transmission into first gear and suffered the curse: every child in the world had become my responsibility.

Take for instance the foot race I foolishly entered the other day: the young gazelle in front of me was about to trip on his loose shoelace.

Forever the teacher, I worried so until I insisted he stop, guaranteeing I would not pass him if he would just let me tie that errant lace. I knotted the shoelace and as promised did not pass him at the finish line. (For the record, I did not let him beat me either. He won handily all on his own, fair and square!)

But, the English teacher’s curse is the darkest of all teacher curses. Not only must we protect every child, we also become the copy editor for the universe.

Not a comma may go unnoticed, not a single misplaced capital may go silently by, nay, not a misspelling may go unchecked. And I say now, it’s a wicked curse.

What am I to do when the doctor’s office has not capitalized its clinic’s name? Walk away and not mention that capitals would insist they are worth my money, but lower case letters leave me wondering?

What of the realtor who attempts to sell a $400,000 house with a formal dinning room? A “dinning” room? Should I ask if their dinning room is always filled with loud noise or just while they are dining?

How should I respond to the excited student accepted at a collage instead of at a college? Tell them good luck, and don’t eat the glue?

And should I turn away when the big box store that graces the once beautiful view of Wasilla Lake misspells their vegetables? How can I be silent and help them to market “Cilentro @ $.99.” Oh boy, emptie you’re wallets hear.

Do I merely ignore their errors and let them continue to flaunt their ignorance? Horrors.

I am indeed cursed. Never before did I see the mistakes. However, after years of teaching Language Arts, errors, as if in neon, flash daily before my eyes.

I yearn to jump out of my driver’s seat, whip out a red pen and correct these crimes against conventions. In fact, much to my own amazement and dismay — not unlike during that starry night in New Mexico — I have often done just so.

Spelling, like it or not, sneaks around as a covert intelligence test, publicly displaying your score. Late night talk show hosts laugh at and scorn bad spellers every week in a mass media version of public stocks.

Nightly, we guffaw at these public idiots and then come daylight turn our eyes from their mistakes. Shame! Someone needs to protect these honest mistakes from such harassment. The provincial quote demands me to answer, “If not now, when? If not me, who?”

Alas, even though I couldn’t spell my way out of a cave or punctuate my way down a river in a canoe with paddles, by mere association with the Language Arts classroom, I have become said Keeper of Conventions.

So please, I beg of you, pray forgive me. I am simply laden with a double dose of the teacher curse: your children are mine forever; and your spelling still counts.

Emily Forstner teaches at Wasilla Middle School.