The Education President?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Offering a grammar lesson guaranteed to make any English teacher cringe, President George W. Bush told a group of New York school kids on Wednesday: "Childrens do learn."

ADVERTISEMENT

Bush made his latest grammatical slip-up at a made-for-TV event where he urged Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, the centrepiece of his education policy, as he touted a new national report card on improved test scores.

The event drew New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings plus teachers and about 20 fourth and fifth graders from P.S. 76.

During his first presidential campaign, Bush -- who promised to be the "education president" -- once asked: "Is our children learning?"

On Wednesday, Bush seemed to answer his own question with the same kind of grammatical twist.

"As yesterday's positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured," he said.

The White House opted to clean up Bush's diction in the official transcript.

Bush is no stranger to verbal gaffes. He often acknowledges he was no more than an average student in school and jokes about his habit of mangling the English language.

Just a day earlier, the White House inadvertently showed how it tries to prevent Bush from making even more slips of the tongue than he already does.

As Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, a marked-up draft of his speech briefly popped up on the U.N. Web site, complete with a phonetic pronunciation guide to get him past troublesome names of countries and world leaders.

Re: The Education President?

I should start this off by saying that the irony of the story is rather hilarious and my sense of humor is fully intact.

On a more serious note...

I guess I'm sort of over the cheap shots at the President. There are more than enough legitimate, important things to pick at than grammatical speech errors. We've all made mistakes - none of us speaks the Queen's English 24 hours a day -- and we've all had slip ups in front of a crowd when having to give a speech, no matter how many times we've practiced it. Granted, none of us is President (and yes, "is" is the correct verb there ), but the President is still human.

And not for nothing, but is the press really so naive as to think that NO other President gets the exact same marked up speeches, with pronunciation guides, that Bush gets? A good friend of my ILs is a secret service agent and has been for years. He says they ALL get marked up speeches.

I think it would be a far more intelligent article to discuss the serious inadequacies in the No Child Left Behind Act and also the serious inadequacies that need to be addressed in our education system.

I don't care if he slips up, uses slang, or whatever during a speech. So what.

Let's discuss the real issues -- and the real issue isn't Bush's ability to speak publicly (or lack thereof). I mean, some of his slip ups have been more than embarassing, and many of them have been rather comical... but here's an opportunity to get down to the nitty gritty and the press wants to just poke fun at Bush's speech.

Just my $0.02. No Child Left Behind is a disaster, IMHO... but doing nothing is also a disaster. I wish the news would talk about the things that are really important rather than focus on this. (Yes, I know, one story out of hundreds or even thousands written every day... but I bet it'll be the headline on the news programs tonight!) Okay... done being on my soapbox and being seriousl. It's not a matter of nuculer war or anything.

ETA - I'm very sorry if I put too serious a twist on what you probably intended to just be a funny post. That hit me after I wrote it...

Message edited 9/26/2007 3:59:47 PM.

Re: The Education President?

Posted by Kara

I should start this off by saying that the irony of the story is rather hilarious and my sense of humor is fully intact.

On a more serious note...

I guess I'm sort of over the cheap shots at the President. There are more than enough legitimate, important things to pick at than grammatical speech errors. We've all made mistakes - none of us speaks the Queen's English 24 hours a day -- and we've all had slip ups in front of a crowd when having to give a speech, no matter how many times we've practiced it. Granted, none of us is President (and yes, "is" is the correct verb there ), but the President is still human.

And not for nothing, but is the press really so naive as to think that NO other President gets the exact same marked up speeches, with pronunciation guides, that Bush gets? A good friend of my ILs is a secret service agent and has been for years. He says they ALL get marked up speeches.

I think it would be a far more intelligent article to discuss the serious inadequacies in the No Child Left Behind Act and also the serious inadequacies that need to be addressed in our education system.

I don't care if he slips up, uses slang, or whatever during a speech. So what.

Let's discuss the real issues -- and the real issue isn't Bush's ability to speak publicly (or lack thereof). I mean, some of his slip ups have been more than embarassing, and many of them have been rather comical... but here's an opportunity to get down to the nitty gritty and the press wants to just poke fun at Bush's speech.

Just my $0.02. No Child Left Behind is a disaster, IMHO... but doing nothing is also a disaster. I wish the news would talk about the things that are really important rather than focus on this. (Yes, I know, one story out of hundreds or even thousands written every day... but I bet it'll be the headline on the news programs tonight!) Okay... done being on my soapbox and being seriousl. It's not a matter of nuculer war or anything.

ETA - I'm very sorry if I put too serious a twist on what you probably intended to just be a funny post. That hit me after I wrote it...

Re: The Education President?

I figured. I'm sorry.

I'm happy to delete if you prefer.

Re: The Education President?

It's pretty sad, isn't it?

I'm sorry--I know he's human...but shouldn't the head of a country know how to pronounce other countries with which he has dealings?

I'm so sick of this man--as a citizen, as a teacher...as an intelligent human being! These next 500 days will NOT go fast enough!!