What's wrong?

Another exam season and another big hullalaboo about teachers posting students' bloopers on the teachers' webpages for public entertainment. What's wrong with this, as long as the teacher does not single out the student? After all, these are the usual bloopers we see year in year out. And didn't we most enjoy the NG sequences at the end of each movie? Why do we have double standards here?

I mean, anyone could have written "My grandmother was diagnosed with cologne cancer." And what's wrong with that? A spelling mistake is a spelling mistake. Some of these boo-boos actually become actual materials, which are used for teaching future teachers.

Some times, how you speak is how you write. That's why apart from small eyes and a flat nose, a man can have a "pork belly". If anything at all, teachers can reflect if they had been unclear or sloppy in speech. After all, many students spell by approximating perceived sounds. This is especially evident in how a student tried to learn how to "trap water."

Some times, the students themselves are at fault. That was also why for the longest time when I was teaching English, I had compositions that went, "Human beans are...," despite my constant reminding that it is "beings." Some students simply take a much longer time to learn, I guess.

And my then-principal, who speaks with a perceptible lisp since she had come from a foreign land, gave me even more grief when her "in another words" got repeated ad naseum in my students' writing, as they "learly" (another one of her mispronunciations) thought what she said was right. It took me long battles and many bouts of unofficial speech belittling to get the students back on track.

I still remember one particularly dense student who kept writing Emerald Teo for Admiral Teo because that particular cohort of kids was doing The Wizard of Oz for literature. She simply could not tell the difference between the rank and the rock. So homonyms often become a source of jokes in themselves. How else can you explain how one can get "cologne cancer"? Ok, granted that using too much artificial fragrances could land you in such trouble, but unless you are one of those super-duper well to do rich tai tais whose main aim is to outsmell the roses, how can anyone be so bedevilled?

Idiosyncratic phrasal verbs are another area where mistakes can be plentiful. The unknowing child could easily end up writing "night has fallen and the lamp posts are turned on..." Linguistic nuances are often lost on non-native speakers. This is similar to how the oddity of "is" vs "have" in French: "Je suis chaud" (literally: I am hot) and "j'ai chaud" (I have hot) respectively mean "I am horny" and "I am hot" in French.

Man, why wouldn't people face it that the best way to learn is to make the mistake, face the ignominy of it and put in the effort to correct it?