Back in the 40’s
I became aware of my lack of spelling abilities back in the 3rd grade (1940’s). When we were going to have a spelling test the teacher would write the 10 or 12 words on the black board and we would write them on our Big Chief tablet. This was so we could learn to spell the words before the test on friday.
Each evening my mother would say the word and I would spell it for her, by thursday evening I had them all down pat.
On friday the teacher would say the word and we would write them down. I felt so pleased as I remembered how to spell the one word that had been giving me trouble all week. After we turned in our papers we were assigned another task to do while the teacher graded our papers. I was confident that I had spelled them all correctly and expected to see a 100 on my paper.
While I was doing my assigned task the teacher came to my desk and showed me my test paper while pointing to one of the words. She asked me to pronounce the word, I read the word to my self and then said it out loud to the teacher. She said “OK, now spell it” and as I was spelling it I saw that I had left the “r” out of “shirt”. It took me about 30 seconds to become red faced and embarrassed as any 8 year old boy would in front of his teacher.
She still gave me 100 on the test. Sometimes today when things go wrong I still leave the “r” out of “shirt”.
July 22, 2008
Posted in: Long Ago
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