The Grammar and Spelling Police are on duty again this week. That oft-mentioned electronic message board on Mills keeps committing errors. Here’s how:

An Albuquerque TV station, reporting on the much-understated “hazing” incident involving members of the Robertson High School football team, showed in the background the animated sign which carried the message, among other things, “The drama is begining.”

It’s not the drama that’s beginning (note the three n’s), it’s the typos. Remember, some of these repeated messages remain for days. Continue reading →

For years I’ve looked for ways of saving time. And paper, and even effort.

Reluctantly entering the computer-acquisition crowd, I got my first computer — not for me personally but for the office where I worked — on the advice of a Highlands colleague, Ron Maestas.

Maestas was light years ahead of me, his having delved into the then-new invention when the first models arrived. Some were Radio Shack TRS-80 models, lacking a hard drive and surrendering all the data once the machine was unplugged. Continue reading →

In Sunday School back in the Dark Ages, my co-teacher and I asked our students what turns them on. “What do you really like to do?” we asked each one.

The responses ranged from celebrating a birthday to winning a football game to kicking around with friends to being with family. Then my colleague turned the camera on me: And what do you like to do, Art?

I fidgeted, stumbled and stammered, not having expected the question. Well, aside from being with people, especially family and friends, I mentioned that I enjoyed long walks with my whippets, Moosa and Watsita, which coincidentally had been given me by my co-teacher’s daughter that year.

I admit it. I love most dogs. I loved throwing a ball as far as I could in order for Moosa to retrieve it and “hand” it back, somewhat gooey. Or riding my bike as fast as I could and watching the dogs overtake me, even though my speedometer showed 35 mph, which equals 245 mph in dog miles. I loved those animals, both now dead. Watsita died of a bronchial infection; Moosa died shortly after being mauled by a neighbor’s dog that slipped out of his chain and collar. Continue reading →

A high school play, “The Perfect Idiot,” deals with an extremely bright senior who misses all 100 items on a true-false test.

How’d he manage that? Statistical probability dictates that anyone who simply checks off every answer as “true” or every one as “false” is bound to score around 50 percent. In order to earn a perfect zero (or perfect hundred), the student obviously needed to know all the answers.

But does anybody have all the answers? Or, perhaps more appropriately, “Does anyone even know the questions?”

I refer to the just-released results that show which area schools achieved “Adequate Yearly Progress,” or AYP, as part of the No Child Left Behind act, also known as NCLB, and sometimes called “Nickelbee.”

The results show that of West Las Vegas’s nine schools, four of them, Don Cecilio Elementary, Rio Gallinas charter school, Union Elementary and Valley Elementary met the AYP standard. Continue reading →

It seemed a bit ironic as I contemplated the existence of the content and the medium as I carried on an e-mail conversation with Martin Salazar, the former Optic reporter, now the education writer with the Albuquerque Journal.

People have been e-mailing one another for years, so that fact in itself isn’t unusual. The irony was that I was asking Salazar his opinion on an article he’d written this week on a topic I have trouble accepting: online college degrees.

Salazar’s front-page article is about two Albuquerque residents, Jenna Harper and Yvette Sanchez, who recently earned online bachelor’s degrees from Western New Mexico University without ever setting foot on the Silver City campus.

The irony is that I don’t fully accept the notion that degrees should be awarded that way, but as I was quizzing Salazar, he pointed out that at that moment, he was in a hospital waiting room in Albuquerque waiting for his father to be seen by a doctor. Continue reading →

One of the justifications for terse writing is the supposed cost of space. An inch of space in the New York Times, for example, would cost a fortune.

So if the publishers of Gotham City’s leading newspaper can, they’ll sell the space for a premium price and try not to give too much of it away.

The notion of tight newspaper space came clear to me this week as I watched David Giuliani, the Optic’s managing editor, going through old files for his Back in Time feature that appears on Page 1 every day.

This month, Giuliani picked files from July 1942, about many people who have since passed on. Someone born in 1942 would be in the mid-60s. But more impressive are the appearance and the content of those old files.

The Optic looked like many other newspapers of that era, with screaming all-caps headlines in 2-inch type. A banner headline that read “FIVE SLAIN IN DRUNKEN BRAWL” invariably would carry a distant or even foreign dateline. Continue reading →

The second-silliest traffic arrangement in the Meadow City — second only to the welcome-but-stay-off-this-street messages on Seventh Street — is around the Old Town Plaza.

Let me explain:

There are five ways to enter the Plaza: from Bridge Street, North Gonzales, Hot Springs, West National and South Pacific. But in some cases, once you’re in that magic circle, you still need to yield to traffic coming from Hot Springs and from South Pacific.

The configuration — called a “circus” in other countries — is bad for traffic rounding the park and heading east, toward Bridge Street, or back around the park.

Most cumbersome is having to yield to traffic coming from South Pacific, in the area of Art and Stones. Why? Because the stretch is w-a-y too long, and by the time motorists yield for one car, there are more coming down the pike. Continue reading →

We were pulling out of the Lowe’s parking lot Wednesday, with two grandchildren, Arthur and Carly, in the back seat, when my wife reminded me to wait until they’d shut their doors before I drove off.

Point well taken. I’ve always been impatient once I get behind the wheel and people are still loading. Once, my wife says, when our own kids were the age our grandkids are today, I reacted to a slammed door and drove about a mile from where Bonnie had been loading watermelons and cantaloupes. I didn’t snap until Adam, our elder child, asked why I’d left Mom behind.

Over the years that story has been retold, with many details adjusted for inflation. So instead of having traveled a mile from the fruit stand without her, I supposedly forced her to walk five. Instead of a 14-pound watermelon, it grew to 328 pounds; instead of a comfortable 72 degrees outside, it became Phoenix-like; instead of a 10-minute delay, it grew to 40 days and 40 nights; and instead of comfortable walking shoes, Bonnie was wearing stilettos.

Except for the poetic license and the slight embellishment of the details, I plead guilty. I’m trying to learn that if a door closes in a car and I’m behind the wheel, the sound doesn’t necessarily mean all the passengers have entered and we’re ready to roll. Continue reading →

Lately, we’ve seen photos of gleeful students being awarded personal laptop computers: the reward for completing a course, program or workshop.

The prize, to be sure, is not really a freebie; students need to complete some course of study; nor is the windfall restricted to this area, as schools have for years lured students by offering them free computers.

Changes have taken place regarding the ages of the users. Remember when only Dad and Mom could use the behemoth Radio Shack TRS-80 computers of the past, and allowed Junior to touch it only under supervision? The mantra used to be, “Don’t touch it — you’ll break it!”

Our granddaughters come over often — surely it’s to visit their favorite paternal grandparents — but sometimes with the request to use a laptop to play games. Permission (usually) granted, much to their delectation.

Yes, things have changed. Continue reading →

There shall be no further debate: The word is “adviser” and not “advisor.” Period.

Of all the questions that get asked of a teacher, the perennial one is whether the noun that identifies someone who advises ends in “er” or “or.”

Strange that not enough people have caught on.

The Associate Press Stylebook doesn’t even try to explain the rationale for why it’s “adviser” rather than “advisor.” It simply declares that the first spelling is correct.

So I did some research on why there’s a discrepancy with these and other words. The discrepancy, by the way, is huge, in that we find the misspelled word, i.e, the one that ends in -or, in newspaper ads, in most job descriptions and in the cranial storage facilities of every English teacher on the planet. We journalists, though correct, remain outnumbered.

As one who taught mostly journalism at Highlands but English in high school and at Luna Community College, I find it necessary to acquiesce and spell it incorrectly, with “-or” when at Luna. The rest of the time it’s -er.

But that’s not convincing enough. One wants to know why some words contain the “e” and others the “o.” Continue reading →