Gr8 Db8

Although educators have become enlightened about the link between spelling and intelligence or academic ability - there is none - any teacher of writing will admit to being both amazed and amused from time to time at students' creative misspellings. While spell check certainly helps writers produced more polished essays, my experience is that it doesn't seem to actually help children learn to spell. And with the advent of instant and text messaging, the job for all teachers of writing has gotten more difficult. As Ammon Shea points out in The Keypad Solution, from Friday's New York Times, many have tried to "fix" spelling in the English language, without much success. Now text messaging may be the start of a populist spelling revolution - every English teacher I know cringes at the thought. Will it happen? Is it a good thing? You be the judge.

Why MLK Matters

Every family has its stories. Or perhaps they should be called legends, because that’s what they become over the years and through the many retellings. And often they change as time passes and our memory plays tricks on us, or they change simply to make a better story. One of the legendary stories in my family involves my eldest daughter, Riley, and Martin Luther King, Jr. She was in kindergarten and had been learning about the civil rights leader in school, so at dinner one night she excitedly told us all about him. The conversation led us to talk about my father who had died the previous year. Somehow, she hadn’t made what many of us would probably think was the most obvious connection between the two men: they were both African-American. When I informed her of this and that it meant that I, too, am African-American, she was pretty impressed. And because at five she wasn’t quite ready to make the final connection on her own, I finally let her know that this meant that she is African-American. To which she responded excitedly, “I am?! Why didn’t you tell me?!”

That’s our family story, one that’s been told many, many times. And no doubt my telling of it has gotten better over the years, for the sake of maximum humor if not maximum accuracy. Riley just grins and shrugs now, as if to say, “I was five. What did I know about this stuff?” Over the years, I’ve had many interesting discussions around this story, from the innocence of children and if they see race on their own or only after they are taught to see difference to whether African-American is a more inclusive, accurate, palatable term than black. But as the national observance of Dr. King approaches, I’ve been thinking about another thing about this tale points out: his story resonates with children. Why?

While the specifics of slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, nonviolent resistance, the Poor People’s Campaign, war in Vietnam, the social and political atmosphere of the 1960s, and Dr. King’s assassination may escape most children, even a five year-old understands what’s fair. And really Dr. King’s work was just about doing what was right and fair. As he said in his famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, “In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I often implore our students to work hard, play fair, be kind, and get involved. Dr. King asked the same of all of us and then led by example. Kids know fake from real. And they know Martin Luther King, Jr. was the real deal.