The Great Typo Hunt

by Jeff Deck

  “Hate to say it,” she said, “but the first park you decided to visit is where the city used to dump all its trash. We’re hiking over a landfill.”

  That gave me pause until I looked back across the trails and grass, bright in the afternoon sun. The Park Service had done an excellent job landscaping over the sins of the past. “Nicest landfill I’ve seen in a while,” I said.

  We stopped to eat our packed lunches in the shade of a gazebo with a notably spectacular view out across the harbor. Then we continued on to scale the drumlin itself. The path up the summit, such as it was, wound in a spiral. Jane and I walked with intertwined hands as Benjamin scouted ahead. Along the way, we passed older tourists rooting in the bushes by the side of the path, perhaps seeking rare plants for tinctures.

  We came to the top and took in another splendid view, this time covering 360 degrees. I wandered over to a lookout from which you could see the Boston skyline in clear detail. Directly below the skyline stood a sign with a corresponding picture of the skyline, with each of the notable elements labeled: Prudential Tower, Hancock Tower, and so forth. One label made me stop and read again: LONG WARF. That almost but did not quite capture the name of where we’d boarded the ferry to get here; it was a letter short.

  Jane noticed that I had been standing in front of the sign for a few minutes, so she came over. “Jeff, did you … find something?” She sounded a bit apprehensive.

  “It, uh, just popped out at me.” I showed her the error. I’d known not to bring the Typo Correction Kit with me, as that would have been asking for trouble. The League would no longer be making corrections without permission, anyway. However, I couldn’t leave the sign as it was without telling someone in charge about it. Our corrective mission had to carry on, and that started today.

  Benjamin agreed with me in theory. In practice, though, he was nervous. The three of us held court in the summit’s gazebo. No one else had felt the inclination to come up here, it seemed.

  “So you do realize,” I said, “we have to go and point that out at the visitors’ office.” I recalled seeing a grandmotherly ranger sitting at a desk in the center; I figured we’d be able to enlist her help.

  “You have to be kidding,” he said. Our year in exile had tempered his rages and enthusiasms. He’d lost his taste for trouble.

  “Well, we have to stick by our principles,” I said.

  “Oh, can’t we save it for the second tour?”

  “Second tour?” I said.

  “Second tour?” Jane echoed, alarmed.

  He shrugged, pulling back. “Yeah, I was assuming we’d have to get out and do it again, man. Eventually. It’s just a little soon right now to stir the pot.”

  I held firm, fixing my old colleague with a flinty gaze. “We’re off probation now, we have all our rights back. We should be fully entitled to go down there and tell them about it.”

  “Yeah … I’m not looking forward to that,” said Benjamin. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to back down, but can’t we give it some time, man?”

  I stood. If I’d thought to bring my Santa Fe hat, I would have put it on then. “Don’t worry about it,” I said casually. “Jane and I will take care of it.”

  Jane got up, too. “Second … second tour?” she said. Her knees knocked together.

  We turned and began to head back down the drumlin. A moment later, Benjamin tore by us, hollering, “I’ll get there before you do, suckas!” He trotted down the stone-lined culvert along the path. Before long, we reached level ground and walked into the visitors’ center. As we stepped inside, the kindly-looking old ranger got up from her station at the desk and ambled out to the front porch. A man in powder-blue with a sour expression sat down at the desk and leafed through a magazine.

  Jane clutched my arm and whispered, “Oh no! What happened to Grandma?”

  I assured her that we’d be fine asking this guy for help instead. Nevertheless, she suddenly took an interest in the historic displays several yards away from the ranger’s desk. It would be up to Benjamin and me, then. We approached the desk, and the ranger looked up from his magazine. “What can I do for you?”

  “Hi there,” I said, giving him a friendly smile. “We were up on the North Drumlin, enjoying the beautiful view. While we were up there, we happened to notice a typo in a sign up there—the one that explains the view of Boston. ‘Long Wharf’ was missing its h.”

  The ranger peered at us dispassionately for a second, and then the weathered contours of his face described a smile. “Is that so? I must have missed that.”

  “Is there any way that somebody could fix that?”

  “Tell you what,” he said, “if you write down the mistake, and which sign it was in, I’ll make sure to pass the note on to the right person.”

  “Great!” said Benjamin, tearing out a page from his ever-present poetry notebook. He checked the Spectacle Island brochure and found the sign’s number, then noted that down along with the error.

  “It may or may not take an act of Congress to get that fixed, though,” the old ranger joked.

  We thanked him, collected Jane, and walked out of the office, feeling a familiar brand of satisfaction wash over us. The ranger had been glad to hear about the error when we brought it up congenially and directly. Our conversation with him now reinforced my certainty that we had steered back onto the correct track. Stealth corrections had no place in the League, and probably never should have. As we waited for the ferry to arrive and convey us to Georges Island, I reflected that the most rewarding moments of the TEAL trip had not been when we successfully carried out covert alterations, but when we had engaged with people in honest conversations about spelling and grammar. Our countrymen hadn’t always wanted to hear what we had to say, but the times that they did made it all worth it. Realizing this was one positive result to come out of the Grand Canyon disaster. We’d had as much to learn as anyone else.

  “Are you really thinking about a second tour?” I asked Benjamin later that afternoon, as we toured Fort Warren, a Civil War–era POW camp on Georges Island.

  “Haven’t you been?” he shot back. He walked carefully along the stone borders of old gun emplacements.

  I admitted that I had. I could already feel the barest tingling of a need to get back on the road, to dive once more into the murky pool of modern grammatical realities. Not right away, but sometime within the next year. And this time we’d arm ourselves with more tools to edify than just the Kit. Knowing what we knew now, we could make a bigger difference in American literacy. In fact, we could start working on our broader goals long before we hit the road again.

  On Benjamin’s second leg of my original typo hunt, we’d begun to reimagine TEAL’s mission. A second quest would have to take that altered vision into account. Even if we hunted down typos and—with permission, of course—fixed them, that might not be our sole mission. I didn’t know how it would look yet, but already I had visions of replacing “Typo Hunt” with “Editor’s Quest” … or something like that.

  Even as Benjamin spurred me to voice these ideas and recognize that I couldn’t not embark on a second journey, we had to address the other half of TEAL’s mission: education. People couldn’t be their own editors if they didn’t fully understand the mechanisms of grammar and spelling. Even as we worked to sharpen the editing skills of the present generation, TEAL had to proactively enable the next generation of communicators.

  Benjamin had made this half a personal focus, as he related most to this part of the mission. He’d teetered on the brink of plunging into a teaching career, had brought up the possibility occasionally, back when we shared a Maryland apartment. During our year of probation he’d returned to spelunk the halls of research that had so consumed him during the trip itself. He’d emerged dusty and triumphant, telling me excitedly that he had found the solution to the nation’s orthographic conundrum—and that it had been here all along, or at least for the last fifty years. Two days after we visited Spectacle Island,
we joined with Callie and Authority in poignant reunion and drove a few miles over to Malden, Massachusetts. Benjamin had arranged for us to visit the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School.

  We walked into a class of thirty children reading words aloud from a list in their books. It was a diverse crowd, for Massachusetts, anyway: besides the majority of white kids, there were also Hispanic, black, and Asian kids. Their fingers held their place in the books, and a teaching assistant continually refocused individual kids by moving a hand or an arm to make sure all fingers followed the action. In unison, the class spoke: “Dis-uh-pEEr!”

  “My turn,” the teacher said loudly and clearly, raising her hand in front of her as if she had called on herself. “Eyes on me.” That’s where the eyes went; it was almost like a game. She gave them a simple definition of disappear. This she read from the script she cradled in an arm while walking among the students, leading the children through their phonics-based reading lesson. Benjamin had found us a school that used Direct Instruction (DI), a teaching model with a scripted curriculum. The teacher’s authority is explicit, the children respond when signaled, and feedback is both positive and immediate.

  With a “your turn” the teacher let them know they’d be expected to answer again. Before each response, the teacher let them know exactly what they were supposed to do, paused for a beat, then said “Get ready!” It wasn’t the “get ready” of “ready, set, Go!” but the wind-up of the ball being pitched, and the kids knocked it out of the park: “D-I-S-A-P-P-E-A-R.” Well, I’d thought they’d hit it out of the park, but the teacher heard some hesitation and had them spell it again.

  In my own school days, I’d answered questions about twice an hour. In this hour-and-a-half Reading Mastery lesson, these kids easily surpassed one hundred responses each. As they moved to the next word list, the teacher began asking the class to identify each word’s first syllable before reading the whole words. They cruised along until they hit remove; an mmm slipped into one quadrant of the classroom. The teacher immediately took back over with “my turn” to explain that the first syllable of remove is just re.

  Once the class had made it through all the words, the teacher switched to calling on kids by name to review them. “Good sounding it out, Arlene,” the teacher said. “Good sticking with it, Bret.” “Nice smooth reading, Cindy.” She’d been inserting comments like these all along, albeit not as often, when they were reading things together. “Good knowing these hard words,” she’d told them. To close this part of the lesson, the teacher mentioned that there’d been one word they’d need to return to tomorrow. Could anyone guess what their one “goodbye word” was? More than two-thirds of the kids raised their hands. “Yes, Don?” Don thought monthly, which hadn’t sounded crisp even on the class’s second try, was the culprit. Sure enough, monthly went up onto the board under drank, a previous goodbye word.

  Pointing fingers went to the beginning of a story. “I like how Emily’s pointing. I like how Franklin’s pointing.” Each child read three sentences aloud. Their story was no absurdly repetitive narrative like See Spot run. Run, Spot, run! Oh! Oh! We can run and run and run! These stories actually made sense (even if you took the pictures away). Ms. McKinnon, our administrator tour guide, explained that the writers did try to keep the text unpredictable. After a sentence about two people, a next sentence might start with They, but it starts with That instead. Thus the reader must be actually reading and not guessing from context. We were treated to the tale of a beagle who had lost a little weight so he could bound higher up into the air. We watched the boy who got to read a punch line pause to mug for everyone as the class cracked up.

  Ms. McKinnon directed our attention to the teacher and her book. She took quick notes of how many errors the class made. She’d said they would read this story making “less than nine errors,” but she counted even the hesitations as errors, so I didn’t think they were going to make it. We had to move on, though.

  As we left the room, Benjamin asked, “Those were first graders?” We visited on September 15, so the school year had only begun three weeks earlier. I tried to remember when I’d first heard the word syllable.

  The kindergarten class down the hall had been divided into three groups. We observed one group learning to connect sounds with letters. The e they were learning had the macron, or bar, on top to indicate that it was specifically the long e. They weren’t naming the letters; they were making the sounds; s meant the hissing “ssss” sound, not “ess.” We watched the end of the ritual. The teacher held up a sheet with the letters, pointed to one, and said, “Get ready.”

  “Goodbye ssss.”

  The teacher made an x over it. The pencil pointed to the next one. “Get ready.”

  “Goodbye ee.”

  We watched a different group blending sounds together.

  “First you say sssss, then you say at. First you say sssss, then you say at,” the kindergarten teacher sang, and with each sound came a gesture.

  The child said ssss and at as instructed, and then the teacher requested it be said the fast way. “Sat.”

  “Yes, sat.”

  As we left, one of the boys who was returning to his seat held up his tickets. “I got three tickets!”

  “Nice work,” I said.

  The tickets were a reward system that this school had created; DI did leave room for individual schools to add their own systems or tweak as needed. If schools used Direct Instruction as their primary program, they might be considered a “DI school.” That needn’t be the only way, though. There were teachers who’d completed the DI training and used the material themselves, alone. Of course, DI worked best when the kids could build on the same skills from year to year.

  Our last stop was another first-grade class, at a different level of Reading Mastery than the first room we visited. The kids were placed by skill level early on. It was crucial that every child have a firm foundation in the basics, but kids who already knew them shouldn’t be allowed to get bored. This solidified my support for DI. The first graders who were working on Reading Mastery level two rather than level three were getting more instruction time with the most important steps of phonics. Even if they were behind the other class, you couldn’t call them remedial readers. Unlike “slower” reading students in other school systems, these guys would be caught up and integrated with their grade-mates somewhere around fifth or sixth grade at the absolute latest, when they’d all be independent readers.

  DI has been around for quite a while. In the 1960s, marketer-turned-educator Zig Engelmann realized that what was most missing from elementary education was clarity of instruction. The kids would absorb whatever the teachers presented, but teachers might be vague, or they might not give enough examples—or enough counter-examples—to reinforce the points they were trying to make. Through continual testing, Engelmann and his colleagues built a scripted method of instruction designed specifically to enhance clarity, thereby accelerating learning for all children.

  Benjamin had met with Jerry Silbert, a coauthor of several DI programs, at the National Institute for Direct Instruction, headquartered in Eugene, Oregon. Silbert had given him a teaching guide for Spelling Mastery, and Benjamin had randomly flipped it open to “Junction changes!” Those oft-awkward meetings of roots and suffixes (or prefixes) had been responsible for many a typo we’d found on the trip. Benjamin examined the page that went over all the rules of consonant-doubling and when not to consonant-double. There were example sets first teaching kids how, and then helping them recognize when to use the rule and when not to. These were basic mechanics of spelling.

  Seeing it in action helped me understand how all the pieces fit together. The script gave the students recognizable cues that all of them understood the same way. In effect, they shared a classroom language, obliterating a legion of communication barriers, from lack of specificity to cross-cultural confusion. Better still, the cues fit into a rhythm of call and response that radically increased the number of times each
child got to respond during the class period. More practice with the material leads to better assimilation of that material. The positive effects compound as the call-and-response setting, along with the continual positive feedback, reduces the stigma of being called on in isolation. While these periods of study are intensive, they’re sensitive to the psychology of the children. The call-and-response approaches a “Simon says” kind of game. Then, of course, there are the phonics drills.

  A century ago, American educators began projecting their own emotions onto the educational process. Deciding that the repetition involved in learning phonics was too dull for them, they eliminated it for the kids who needed it. But as any parent who’s had to sit through multiple consecutive viewings of The Land Before Time XIII can tell you, children love repetition. Unlike the chaotic, seemingly illogical world around them, repetition offers them the power of prediction, of guessing ahead and being right. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell relates how the creators of Blue’s Clues had a tough sell when they asked the network to air each episode five times. The whole week would be the same episode over and over again! They’d done their research, and kids had no problem with watching the same episode repeatedly, becoming more excited as they worked through the same puzzles, grasping the concepts better each time. Phonics instruction works in exactly the same way, both in allowing the children to build up their knowledge and apply it better with practice, and in appealing to the inner delight that comes from mastery.

  Like Blue’s Clues, DI is research driven. The first book that directed Benjamin’s attention to DI was Super Crunchers; Ian Ayres used it as an example of his larger discussion on the battle between intuition and data. DI, of course, was in the camp representing data. While individual teachers with their varied methods may feel they know best how to teach their students, the abnormally high rate (for a First World country) of illiteracy (14 percent of American adults in 2003—30 million people) suggests that the school system has largely failed. In 1967, President Johnson initiated Project Follow Through, a long-term government study of seventeen different teaching methods. Eight years later, DI was the hands-down winner across multiple measures of success. DI students earned the highest test scores in core subjects like vocabulary and math, but Project Follow Through also checked students’ ability to tackle higher-order thinking problems and even determined which students had the highest self-esteem. DI won in those categories too, proving that when students are given the chance to feel smart by actually understanding the material, everything else would fall into place. But thirty years after that revealing data, DI is still used by only a handful of schools in America.