Back in 1963, I Erased a Word

George remembered that I had told him this story from my 8th grade English class (he had referred to an event in his 3rd grade in a blog entry on his delta quadrant website).

During 1963 (which I think was way before Spelling Bees were important), I had an English teacher named Miss Graham who wanted us to be good spellers. We had a test every week. The test was to spell 10 or possibly 20 words that had been assigned to us. There was close monitoring of the students to prevent cheating which I thought appropriate. However, there were also a variety of what I thought to be arbitrary rules. One such rule was the 'no erasure; no crossout' rule. That is, that if your answer had the word spelling right but there was an erasure or crossout, it was ruled an incorrect answer. I tried to do erasures neatly but they were detected.

One day we had a creative writing assignment. I wrote a story about a student who had a coughing spell and accidentally made a mark on several of his words, thus getting them wrong on a spelling test. Because of this something bad happened to the student (I forgot what it was, he may have not gotten into college or something). Obviously the teacher didn't like it.

If I recall correctly, I received a "C" in English that year and in 9th grade English was assigned to an English Class in a lower track (lower achieving students). I actually enjoyed that 9th grade class quite a bit more than the 8th grade.