Nothing points out the current state of affairs with regard to our national decline in overall competence than this story about a young pre-teen contestant on Jeopardy who was told his answer was wrong because of a one-letter misspelling.
If you are a fan of Jeopardy at all, you know that adult contestants have their “questions” routinely disqualified for bad pronunciation, poor spelling, missing syllables – in other words, anything but the absolute correct “question”.
Even this 12-year old in question, who is now claiming he was “cheated” should know that you don’t get full credit on a test if you misspell the word. Knowing the right words, but not how to spell or say them counts. Real life does not give you a pass just because your heart is in the right place or you have good intentions.
As a country, we are seeing more of this acceptance of “almost is good enough”. We see a decline in literacy and spelling because so many of us now use short-hand words when we text one another on our smartphones. We see a decline in literacy because instead of spending the summer reading books, kids now spend their unsupervised summers playing video games on the large-screen TV’s in their bedrooms.
Sure, this kid, in this instance, knew the right question for the answer, but he was unable to complete the job by presenting his idea in writing correctly. Rather from haste, negligence or from simply not knowing how to spell the word, he gave a wrong answer.
Think one letter doesn’t matter? How about if you get one symbol wrong as a chemist? How about if you get one number wrong on the coordinates of where you are sending a drone strike if you are the controller? How about you get a letter wrong when talking to an airplane as a traffic controller? How about if you are a 911 operator and get one letter off in a street address when sending a fire crew or an ambulance? All of these examples of “almost there” competence show no intent to do wrong, but result in catastrophe for someone. Even something as innocent as one number wrong in when calling a phone number means that you aren’t able to complete a call to who you intended.
This 12-year old kid has made two mistakes. The first one was his misspelling of a word in a game, the second one is being allowed to think he was “cheated”. Some adult in his life needs to sit down with him and help him evaluate truth from fiction, right from wrong and teach him that ‘almost” simply isn’t good enough in most cases.
Well said. Such cultural decline is common in our time, and the slope seems ever downward. There is a sense of entitlement now in many segments of our society that would have been staggering fifty years ago. Even world geography is no longer required in most schools. Very sad and a bit scary.