When I was a kid, I don’t remember what age, I had a teacher who used to like to give us a list of vocabulary words to memorize. Then we’d have a spelling bee in class. The first time she did this I was one of the last kids standing when she asked me to spell a day of the week. I spelled it correctly, but was still eliminated because I failed to say that it started with a capital letter.
Okay, so a minor irritation. I got over it. Then the next week the same thing happened. There were two of us left, and she hit me with a day of the week again. I spelled it right, but being so focused on the spelling, I forgot to specify capitalization yet again. The other kid won.
I still thought it was just a weird coincidence, so I wasn’t really thinking about it on week three when she hit me with a day of the week again, and I forgot yet again. But by now I knew it wasn’t a coincidence, which meant she couldn’t really be reading the words off those randomly shuffled 3×5 cards after all.
The next week I wore a rubber band around my wrist to remind myself, but I was pretty easily distracted back then, and sure enough, I didn’t say “capital w” when spelling Wednesday. The entire class laughed.
This happened every week for the entire school year, but after a while I didn’t capitalize on purpose. She was cheating to try to force a point. She knew it, I knew it. I was trying to see how long she’d keep it up.
Looking back at this with adult eyes, I realize what a weird situation that was. Yeah, it might have been an effective teaching tool if I had triumphed after a few weeks, but setting me up like that every week for an entire year, at some point it stops being instructive and starts being vindictive.
If I could travel back in time, I’d say, “Hey, you bitter old windbag, you don’t know it yet, but in a couple decades everyone will have computers, and those computers will correct me every single time I forget to capitalize a day of the week, thus saving the planet from inevitable doom, so you can relax.”
There was an unintended lesson in there. Try as you might to get along in this world, sometimes you’re going to run into people who are hell-bent on setting you up for failure. If she intended to teach me that, she needn’t have bothered. Life will hand you that lesson once in a while.
Just not every single freakin’ week.
(Image credit: realkuleads.com)
The View from a Drawbridge 
HO! To this day I cannot remember what a prepositional phrase is or does, or how to pronounce Ecru. Hiss to those that think it is funny to make someone squirm.
Sadly, there are a lot of people out there who do just that.
THIS MADE ME LAUGH AND THINK…