GRAMMAR: Sign of the times

Mrs. Language Person, public school English teachers and parents of K-12 public school children, please take note!

Staff writer Hannah Neff did an excellent job in her article on the Lakes Middle School’s Kind Club in the Local section of Saturday’s Press. Not so much for the photographer who took the picture accompanying the article.

It shows club members and their adviser holding handmade signs in a legitimately, noble attempt to promote kindness among themselves and others. Unfortunately, neither the photographer nor the club’s adviser appears to have taken a close enough look at the sign held by one of the club’s members to notice a significant grammatical error.

The sign reads: “We appreciate you’re hard work” when it should have read “We appreciate your hard work.” In addition to revealing the author’s and/or carrier’s not being able to differentiate between the contraction “you’re” for “you are” and the possessive pronoun “you,” it also reveals, in my opinion, an unacceptable level of lack of attention to detail at play in the teaching of basic English grammar skills in our public schools today. Perhaps the middle school student holding the sign is not to blame; it very well could be he was never taught that “you’re” is a contraction of “you are” which means the sign technically reads “We appreciate you are hard work.”

Hopefully, English teachers and parents with kids in all our public schools will take this to heart as evidence of the need to more deeply explore just how their students and children are being taught English these days.

SKIP FULLER

Coeur d’Alene