My Freshman Spelling Error

I am grading essays this afternoon. Most of them are written by freshman, and occasionally I come across spelling mistakes or grammatical errors that end up being amusing. Some of the mistakes are embarrassingly suggestive (one poor male student wrote about an intimate genre scene and how the viewer "gets a little peak" at what is happening - oh dear!). Others mistakes are completely novel: I just read an essay that tried to turn flâneur into a verb, saying that one could go "flandering" about the streets of Paris. At first I thought this student was trying to use "philandering" instead (which maybe could take place on the streets with some passionate Parisians?), but then this student began to define what it meant "to flander" and I was able to figure out the error.

This latter essay actually reminded me of myself a bit, because "Paris" was consistently spelled as "Pairs" throughout one paragraph. It reminded me of the first essay that I wrote as a freshman. The paper was due during my first semester, and it was for my Book of Mormon class. I even remember going to the computer lab on the second floor of the HBLL to write this paper; I think it was the last semester that Word Perfect was still available on the computers, because back then Word Perfect was my software of choice! Anyhow, I was mortified when I got my paper back and realized that I had consistently misspelled Joseph Smith's name, writing "Joesph" over and over again, throughout the entire paper. How embarrassing to have grown up as a Mormon and not know how spell "Joseph" correctly when I entered BYU!

I wonder if my BOM professor was amused by my typo back then. His corrections served as a learning experience for me, and hopefully the corrections that I make in my students' essays will help them learn, too. Regardless, I'm glad to feel a little bit of empathy for these little freshman who make little spelling and grammatical errors.