lornamatic

So I’m taking a class (over at LA Academy of Figurative Art) in Van Nuys. The class starts at 7PM. but I live on the west side of Los Angeles. Because of that whole traffic problem, I need to leave early enough to beat rush hour, which leaves me with a few hours to fill.

There’s plenty of nice things to do in the valley, plenty of restaurants and coffeeshops (and uh, lots of car dealerships), and I was looking for interesting things to do in the area when Google led me to the Van Nuys High School Rules and Policy page.

I noticed a number of spelling mistakes and typographical errors, so I copied the text and ran it through MSWord’s spell check. Here’s some screencaptures of the 26 errors that Word found. It didn’t pick up correctly spelled but misused words, such as “a flouring academic community.”

Academic recors?
Disciplianry actions extablished by the cousneling office?

I applaud Van Nuys for taking the initiative to get this website up and running, but the question remains: How can anyone expect students to succeed academically, or even take their administration seriously when the people running the place haven’t taken time to ensure that the school policies and rules are readable? Who wrote this?

The first sentence of the school’s plagiarism statement is identical to that of Brigham Young University:

“Plagiarism is a form of intellectual theft that violates widely recognized principles of academic integrity.”

Please understand that I don’t intend to make fun of the school or this situation, because it is evident throughout the page that intentions are in the right place. In Los Angeles, there are plenty of people for whom English is not a first language. And in any urban high school there are certainly bigger problems to solve besides some typograpical typographical errors on a webpage.

But the point is this: that’s no excuse. If you can’t afford a spell checking program, hand it to your coworker. Even one editing pass will help root out these errors and will go a long way towards cleaning up your document.

If your school is public and underfunded, turn it into a classroom project. Now you are teaching English grammar, helping your school save money, and communicating the importance of doing a project well. You’re helping create a civic pride in your school, and showing your students how to project a positive and respectable image, and to do good work, even with a lack of resources.

That’s one of the most important lessons anyone can learn in life.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Los Angeles, Trouble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.