As an English teacher you need to be practically perfect, eh?

Perfection is over-rated, even for English teachers.

Some readers of this blog really absorb each and every word that I write, hanging onto every word, analysing every sentence, noticing misusages, comma splices, and the horribly offensive typos that creep into my writing once in a while. It has been noted that occasionally (or perhaps frequently, depending on your perspective) my postings include some infelicities. I once misspelled waist as waste (!), I've been known to replace they're with their (!!), in the last posting I spelled teachers without the "r" (!!!). You can stop reading now if you've found this news difficult to swallow and are too shocked to continue. You may consider discontinuing your readership of this blog! For the brave, my confession continues...

Shame on me! ... and I call myself an English teacher! You could fault my training. You could blame me for being inattentive to language or just downright deft. You could also just call me human. I get so excited to have a free minute in which to share a thought or two that sometimes I get distracted by the message. I don't always painstakingly proofread my postings as I might for a handout or an article. My friends and family know that I sometimes write with my "hair on fire" and stream-of-conscious is a bit more natural to me in a blog than other forms of writing. After all, a blog is literally a web log or type of journal for jotting down observations and notes, right? Not that I don't care about spelling and correct usage, but everyone needs a place to let their hair down, right? (Yes, there is a pronoun agreement problem in the last sentence, but I am fairly unconcerned.) I know that my friends and family will forgive me and not let it shed bad light upon my character. We all need a little bit of grace.

Someone recently pointed out some language-related issues in my blogging. The comment was as follows:

"As an English teacher you need to be practically perfect, eh?"

I beg to differ. I know how to analyze my audience and having a typo or two probably does not interrupt the message or offend the readership of this blog ostensibly. Secondly, I never aim to present myself as a perfect language user to my students. I do like language. I do like grammar. However, my goal as a teacher is not to present myself as something that I am not. I make mistakes sometimes. All language users -- in writing and speech -- sometimes do. Almost all human beings do at some point or another. It's okay. The interesting part of being a language teacher is presenting language and everything that it is, including a few infelicities, in such a way that students can access and become more aware about how it works. It is a brilliantly challenging job. As many of you know, my work pervades my outside life and a day rarely passes that I don't tuck something away for my students or future language work. Any language is complex, even English.

It is fascinating that this antiquated notion of the flawless English grammarian continues to be a persuasive model for what language teachers do and the kind of character they have. Language is not a thing to be captured and molded; rather language is a tool molded by its users for a purpose, generally communication. Rules and regulations about right and wrong (even if they are petty typos or spelling errors) fall short of explaining the reasons of why language evolves and operates as it does.

That said, my purpose for making this posting is to invite those of you who have issues with my language use to consider whether or not you have understood the message. Make a joke about my errors (I do!). Enjoy them! Use them as an affirmation that your mistakes are a common part of the human condition. Before you seek to chastise me with comments or give me advice on editing, please remind yourself that blogging is for fun. I have taken off my professional hat in this setting. I do far too much professional and academic writing during the day to be worried about being reprimanded for a missing letter in a word that you understood correctly the first time anyway.

Thank you for listening to my diatribe; I hope that I have not steered you in the wrong linguistic direction with any errors as I have not followed the advice of carefully proofing this message. After all, I guess if I misspell one word for every thousand or so here, I consider that to be a pretty good ratio of accuracy to mistake!

**This message was approved by Jennifer Uhler, occasional bad speller despite the fact her mother made her write her mistakes in her spelling words 100 times when she was a child and even though she is now an English language teacher. The reader should be warned that I did not save this as a draft or read it slowly word-by-word to find typos and missing words.