‘i should of known’
‘i should of known’
I know that this period of time, August, is a time that is greatly concerned with education, since exam results are being released now in many countries. I hope that all pupils and students get better grades than they expected, but I am not so inexperienced as not to know that that will not be the case. To those who are disappointed, I address this article and perhaps to their teachers as well.
About fifteen years ago, when I was l was working for our family construction firm, our parents retired and my brothers, co-directors, insisted we take on a secretary to help me run the office.
Eventually, I reluctantly agreed and phoned the Job Centre. The manager there, who knew of our firm, gave me the tip that it was better to phone the Civic Offices, since they ran training programmes and regularly had to ‘let people go’.
So, I did that and our offices were inspected and I was interviewed to see whether we were respectable enough to employ one of their proteges, which we were. The man from the council said that all his students had stayed in school until at least eighteen years of age and then had worked in the Civic Offices for at least a year.
It was a good deal, and there were no two ways around it, so I interviewed two girls, my preference, and took one on full-time.
She was great, and I only say ‘was’ because I am no longer with the firm. However, I noticed a repeated error in her work, which I just could not understand. Unless the first person personal pronoun, was the first word in a sentence, she used a lower-case ‘i’ as in ‘i should of known’.
One day, I had to ask her why she did that, and she said that she always had.
I couldn’t believe it. She was nineteen, had worked for the government for ‘at least a year’ but no-one had picked her up on it.
I did though. I asked her to take any book or magazine off our shelves and show me where ‘I’ could be written ‘i’. I told her to take thirty minutes and a coffee.
She couldn’t find an instance, and cursed her teachers for putting her in such an embarrassing situation. However, she had one more failing, which is seen more and more often these days. She would write “ve’ as ‘of’ as in ‘i should of known’.
I had first noticed it when she wrote me a note: ‘i should of got more milk in but I forgot. Sorry”.
I waited a week and told her, She couldn’t believe why her state educators of fifteen years had not told her she was spelling it incorrectly.
I sympathized with her and still do, but at least she hasn’t been making those embarrassing mistakes for the last fifteen years.
How many people are screwing up their own futures by submitting illiterate CV’s because their teachers thought it better not to tell them about their errors?
Or, and this is almost unthinkable, but how many teachers didn’t realise she was making mistakes?
Please LIKE and SHARE this article using the buttons below.
All the best,
Our bookshop
Podcast: ‘i should of known’
