Found Art #6: My One Perfect Sentence

It's not often that I pick on children. Well, I don't really mean to pick on children, it's just that adults are so much better than children at everything. I can't help laughing when a child falls, or speaks with atrocious diction or fails constantly. Who can? So you can imagine my reaction when I found this little gem in the WinCo parking lot a few weeks ago. There it was, under my own feet, flitting like a butterfly from flower to flower. I let go of my cart, bent over, and cradled it in my hand like an injured mouse. After reality came back to me, I blocked my cart from running into a car parked in the handicapped spot (which was probably there illegally so it wouldn't have mattered in the first place). What did I find? Please, see for yourself.

Ok. I understand you might be out of breath after reading that. I will give to you a typed transcription.

At Scoole a ant screamed very lowd. It was scerd. It was sad. It went home,

At first glance it just appears to be a very poorly written homework assignment. But with a keen eye you can see just how far down the toilet our education system as slipped. The first thing that jumps out at me is the simple fact that, despite the fact that the assignment is clearly labeled 'My One Perfect Sentence', this student has written four sentences, and one of them is incomplete.
Not only are there too many sentences, but the spelling just awful. 'Scoole' is misspelled, and it is needlessly capitalized. If this child moved here from Germany last week I might let it slide, but since the child has chosen to write about her ant friend we'll never know where she was born. 'Lowd' is spelled incorrectly. 'Scerd' is spelled incorrectly. Not only that, but most of the sentences are choppy and oversimple.
Worst of all, at the very end, instead of wrapping up the paper with a witty denoument, the child chose to put a comma followed by a small picture of an ant screaming.

I love the fact that this child is very creative, but the problem with creativity is that it very often gets in the way of propriety. I bet the teacher thought that this was just sublime, how this student butchered our language and expressed herself. Because expressing yourself in a school setting is more important than learning, right? Right?
Let's keep going.
Perhaps even most disturbing is not only the mere acceptance of this child's butchery of the language OR her complete lack of attention paid to the instructions, but it is the fact that the teacher commended her for it!

So what we have here is a wholly transparent view of this teacher's agenda and it amounts to nothing short of absolute horror in the classroom. Absurdity of standards. Defiance of rules. Senseless bucking of lexiconical norms.
So it isn't just the 'Super Job' stamp (and isn't it very telling that the teacher was so enthusiastic about the support of this monstrosity that she used a stamp instead of precious strokes of a real pen?), but the image of the foot simply confounds me. What kind of school is this, anyway? Is it a poetry school? That might explain all of this. I would be far more lenient if I thought that somehow a student of someone who shops at Winco and is supportive enough of his or her daughter to drop their accomplishments on the hot asphalt of a wholesale food outlet would be gifted enough to be accepted into a prestigious art school for 3rd graders. Perhaps it is this parental treatment that drives the child's wild prose and pictographic language.
PERHAPS THE TEACHER THOUGHT IT WAS JUST DANDY THAT THE CHILD THOUGHT THE DATE WAS TWENTY.
We may never know. We may never know...

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