You know, maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised about today’s high school graduates and their mastery of the English language.  It appears there is good reason for their ignorance or apathy, whichever it is.  If you can’t expect good grammar and spelling from instructors, how can you expect it of students.

Every semester, hundreds of thousands of instructors at colleges and universities across the nation and around the world prepare and distribute well-prepared course documents that set the guidelines and standard by which their students will be measured.  So, why in hell would some instructors not even use “Spell Check”? 

I’m not kidding.  Did they not see the little, red, squiggly line that appeared as they were typing these documents?  Of the last four courses I took, I did not have one syllabus that did not include spelling, capitalization or grammatical errors.  I’m not talking about one minor mistake, but rather enough that I, as the student, began to question the credibility of my instructors.

On top of this, when I called my instructors’ attention to their mistakes, not a single one sent out a corrections, but three of the four did respond to my emails.  Of course, their emails were worse than their documents.

Maybe, I’m asking too much.  Should I really expect instructors to set an example for their students?  Should I really expect instructors to care about their credibility with their students?  Should I really expect anyone to use something as cumbersome as “Spell Check”?

I think so.  I think instructors should exhibit the traits that they expect from their students and I think those expectations should be high.  After all, we’re paying to learn and don’t we learn more from actions than from words?