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On Grammatical Errors That Make You Look Like a Positive Idiot

While surfing Facebook, I saw a comment one of my former classmates made on another classmate's photo. Exact wording:

My calves could feed Africa...................but i love you:)

Omg they totally could NOT.... your crazzyyyy gf!

I don't know what exactly it was about these two posts that succeeded in ruining my mood and breaking my concentration for studying 細生; perhaps it was the blatantly ignorant and unforgivable generalization of the first comment, or the grammatical catastrophe of the second. I am positively peevish at the fact that "Africa" has become a large entity to write off starving, dying, and developing country inhabitants. Fallacies. Fallacies everywhere.

Next, it's "You're crazy." You're. You're, damn it, YOU'RE. The fact that even Taiwanese people get this right, and not seniors in your typical American public high school (English is your native language, I think I have permission to fling you across the river for another you're/your confusion) annoys me to no end. I will never understand how you went through eighteen years of schooling not knowing how to differentiate the two, and good Lord, this is something you learned in first grade. I will never understand your English deficiencies when you've grown up speaking it for the last eighteen years of your little life. It doesn't matter half as much on Facebook, but I've graded papers that show the same mistakes, over, and over, and over again. It's a waste of ink, a waste of brainpower, and a waste of my precious red pens. The five below literally make me writhe in pain when I have the misfortune of coming across them.

• You're/Your confusion.
  
• It's/Its confusion.
• Affect/Effect confusion.
  
• They're/Their/There confusion.
• ___ and I, not me and ___.

Another thing I don't understand is seeing things like this, written by American parents, who send their children to school as if they expect them to do any better:

Health Issues (Our major concern)
We concern about the high levels of variable
radio frequency emissions coming from this tower. Leland/Bret Harte buildings in which the children will spend 6-7 hours a day are all in close proximity to the proposed site and the unknown effects of this radiation causes us against the construction of the tower. Besides it will have impacts on the nearby residents’ health as well for sure.

Damage to Property Values
lower the value of our property.

Lack of Disclosure
There is much anger among residents as to the lack of communication from the school board. The public hearing notice was posted on Leland website which was available for the present high school families only. Other interested parties (parents with younger children who will go to Leland/Bret Harte in the future, and Leland High neighborhood residents) were not informed of the potential construction or public hearing. For a project with such an impact, there was no community meeting scheduled to address the residents' or parents' concerns.

Financial Impact
The installation of the tower would bring extra revenue to the
school district. This financial benefit to homeowners will be more than offset by the
decrease in home values of the residents. Additionally this benefit is only assuming the revenue generated from leasing the space. It does not include the potential legal fees that may be incurred. The residents could possibly file suit for damages resulting from property devaluation. Such a suit can reach class action status if hundreds of residents are affected. Also, who will assume the legal liability if any health or other problems are to arise. When considering the small revenue gain from leasing the tower to the huge potential legal liability it is quite clear that there is no financial justification for the construction of this tower.

In a conclusion, we are asking two questions and suggestions:
1> To be fair to all residents who are impacted, do you think they have right to get
their voice heard? Due to inconvenient of hearing time and short notice within
small percentage of people who are notified about this hearing, most of people
couldn’t attend hearing meeting. So we are asking for another hearing chance in
the evening time in Almaden Valley, either at Leland high school or Bret Harte

The presence of a cell tower in our neighborhood will

Middle School.
2> Are you looking at short-term benefit or long term damage to our health and our
wealth?

In a word, we are strongly against building Cell Tower at Leland High school.

If my mother wrote this, I would applaud her. But coming from a parent whose native tongue is English, my lord. The grammar. The capitalization. If I had to grade this last year, I'd just write a huge "NO" in big, red letters over the entire thing and return it to be rewritten. I did it a few times last year, and those people were only students. The abstract of a paper my roommate's mother, who was born and raised in Taiwan, wrote, was better than this.

I also cannot fathom the idea that the minute you become an English teacher, you cannot spell, capitalize, or write sentences with proper grammar. Perhaps I overstate, but the few I have had the misfortune of coming across in high school were no exceptions. Senior year of high school; English 7/8. Every time we received one of her assignment papers, the majority of our class could point out no less than five spelling and grammar errors in under a minute.

Suddenly, the way my chemistry teacher pronounced "quotient" as "kuo-tee-ent" becomes forgivable. What was the point in getting all defensive when one of my classmates, upon finding out I was from California, called Americans fat and stupid? Because to some extent, I don't see a satisfactory level of intelligence to be called otherwise.