City's educrats can't get it write
By JOE WILLIAMS
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Thursday, November 6th, 2003
City schools are going from bad to badder.
Highly paid educrats at the Education Department shocked the city's 80,000 teachers this week by handing out barely literate curriculum guides riddled with grammatical gaffes, spelling errors and misused words.
Aghast teachers reeled in disbelief as they were:
Urged to "crate [create] a balance bean [beam] with masking tape."
Told to "think about a time when your family work together."
Identify "student strengthens and weaknesses."
Read a story about a fish with "shinning," instead of shining, scales.
"When I see this it breaks my heart," said one Queens teacher. "It's bad enough that the kids can't read and write."
Bloopers litter page after page in the separate guides for elementary, middle and high schools.
Educators were quick to point out that the error-ridden lesson plans came straight from the top - and at a time when fewer than half of city students can read at grade level.
"If a teacher handed in something like this, he or she would be raked over the coals, if not fired," said teachers union President Randi Weingarten.
Education Department bigwigs wrote the guides to help teachers explain a new discipline code to students - "so that everyone understands how serious we all are in making schools that is safe for student's body's, Schools that is safe for students' feelings, And schools that are safe for student's ideas," the error-filled document states.
One Bronx fifth-grade teacher was so appalled by that sentence he used it to teach his kids a lesson in poor writing yesterday.
"It's beyond an embarrassment," he said.
A red-faced Chancellor Joel Klein pledged last night to find the culprits.
"These mistakes are totally inexcusable," Klein said. "I will make every effort to find out who is responsible and will take appropriate action to make sure errors like these never happen again."
Teachers got the guides on Tuesday during an Election Day training session on the new discipline code.
But the educators quickly abandoned talk of student safety and started tallying the gaffes.
One guide urged children to go on a "liter walk," picking up trash around the neighborhood.
The popular book "Amelia Bedelia" morphed into "Amelia Bedila." Author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats became Era Jack Keats in some places and Ezra Jacks Keats in others.
One fictional student in the guide says: "I don't like people teasing me because I like to read a certain kinds of book."
And the snafus weren't limited to spelling problems and missing letters.
The high schools guide calls the ancient area of Sumer "Sumerian."
The authors used "sited" when they meant "cited" and portrayed George Orwell's "Animal Farm" - a cautionary tale about communism - as a story about the importance of rules.
"Anyone can make a few typos," said one Queens teacher. "The errors in here go beyond typos."
nydailynews.com |
