Wow, I must be REALLY good or else. . .

the standards of some public school teachers are really low.

I've recently been involved in an email discussion with a local school teacher about the controversial decision by our school district to put ads on the sides of its school buses beginning this fall. The goal is to raise money that the superintendent says the state cannot or will not pony up. I wrote to him and to an online community group expressing my dismay at such an uncreative and commercialized effort to raise cash. The aforementioned teacher saw my post to the community group and wrote to tell me she thinks the ads are a great idea and that, contrary to my assertion that students are being put up for sale to the highest bidder via the advertising campaign, "we are not selling kids."

I never said the district was going to sell kids. I said the district was going to sell advertising which, in turn, implies that products or services depicted on those ads are endorsed by the district. Not to mention the negative effects of even more commercial marketing targeted at young and impressionable minds.

Anyway, in my private reply to this teacher, I outlined in some detail my own thoughts on the subject based on ideas that resonated with me after reading other people's research as well as information from organizations such as Coalition for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

She wrote me back to say she "didn't need a novel" and that I'd done a good job "copying from some unnoted source."

Wow. I've been accused of plagiarism!!!! Because my own writing was, what, too lofty for a public school teacher who has communicated to me in unpunctuated, uncapitalized and incomplete sentences?

Maybe she thinks no real person really writes like I do unless they are old, obnoxiously scholarly and graduates of Oxford or Cambridge. Can't give credit to a good 'ol gal from South Texas?

There was no "unnoted source." It was all ME, my opinions, my sentence structure, my version of the ideas that are widely available to anyone literate and curious enough to ponder and dissect them.

I replied courteously enough, explaining that I have neither need nor desire to steal other people's words, but thanked her for thinking my work was too good for me to have produced.

Regular readers of this 'blog will vouch for my careful inclusion of reporters' names or original sources for excerpts from which I quote.