I'm sorry, Ms. Jones yu wer rite al alng



Until last week, I was a "Back to Basics" person. As a child, I had invested too much painful effort in good old-fashioned rote learning, not to hold on to it zealously. My early education was anchored in the ancient bedrock of the European pedagogy: the two C's of chanting and copying. To this day, I sing in my head when adding numbers in my checkbook and the tables of multiplication are like sacred oratorios to me. I do use calculators, but shamefully and on the sly. As for copying, when I finished high school, there wasn't a text I hadn't copied, and I could spell anything thrown at me. I was 100 percent literate and detested literature. I wrote perfect letters and hated writing.

After Loni and I settled in this country, I found that are 10-year-old son got abundant gold stars for essays full of spelling errors. I was aghast and went to see the principal, who summoned the teacher--Ms. Jones, let's say--who started to cry when confronted with my wrath.

I'm sorry now I made you cry, Ms. Jones. It never occurred to me that your way was perhaps the right way, that spelling could be revised later and shouldn't kill the joy of writing. Well, Ms. Jones, for whatever it's worth now, you were vindicated last week in my granddaughter Hannah's kindergarten.

Hannah's teacher invited me to be a guest writer and tell a story that Hannah would illustrate on the overhead projector as I spoke. Later, all the children together would make up a three-line synopsis of the story, after which I'd write it down, exactly as instructed by them. It was humbling experience.

Hannah and I picked a simple, real-life story that happened when her daddy, Joost, was a little boy. It was about how Joost and his mother talked me into adopting the kitten, Puss-Puss, that came to our door one evening. And how at first I didn't want to, because I was afraid Puss-Puss would grow up into one ugly, humongous cat that'd growl at me all the time. You know the kind of story.

It was a phenomenal success, especially the growling, because I am a consumate growler. Hannah's drawing were minimalist but fierce and the children had a marvelous time composing the accompanying text. After a lot of discussion, gently nudged by the teacher, this is what they made me write:

Joost wited a cat.
But his dad waz afd av the griling cat.
A cat km to oyr dir we fad it and it lvz with os.

I enjoyed it enormously. Not bad for a former "Back to Basics" person!

- Adrian Korpel At Random