But I’m curious: would you prefer “the teacher and myself approved your request”? Personally, I hate it when people who can’t tell direct from indirect pronouns just substitute “myself” for “me” or “I,” under the false assumption that “myself” sounds better — but at least it does show effort. I just get more bothered by that ignorant effort at pretension than a simple direct statement.

On the positive side, I’m pretty sure that everyone learns grammar from their parents, so Sophie and Annabel are safe.

Ryan, my adult son with DS, always had a plastic drinking straw he’d fiddle with and/or chew, like some folks do toothpicks. This lasted about a decade; unsure when or why it stopped. Beats the heck out of my recovering nicotine addiction. Whatever.

I have loved and respected several extraordinarily bright people who not only spelled poorly, but also could not have cared less! One of them will occasionally ask me how to spell this or that when she deems her writing to be sufficiently important.

Best wishes to GIAPH family.

I am not sure whether her showing me my behavior modified it at all, but I hope so. I do know that school-teaching is nerve-wracking, and I’m now far more lenient to any teacher’s nervous habit (and, also, absolutely paranoid about ever watching a videotape of myself).

I suspect that as Sophie gets older, she will get less inclined to mimic her teachers at all, so this problem may solve itself — but maybe I misunderstand DS. I’m nearly certain none of my 6th-graders ever acquired my nervous-sleeve-rolling habit from me. They did not want to become me, they wanted to become the opposite of me.

Then, after I quit public-school-teaching, I took a job as a professional proofreader, where I learned what you probably already know: no one can proofread her own work well. We read our own work too quickly, knowing too much what we meant to write, and never quite seeing what we did write. That doesn’t stop me from being bothered by other’s mistakes. But my yoga teacher has turned down my offer to proofread her brochure for her for free, and so I just recently resisted the urge to make the same offer to my Soph’s nursery-school-director.

I always get a little sweaty palm like about corresponding with anyone who is good with spelling and grammar. (I had a friend in high school that used to edit the notes I passed her and then give them back to me!) At the risk of being shunned, I say cut the principal a bit of slack, maybe she is trying. I know I have checked and rechecked correspondence before and still missed things (which I don’t see until after I’ve hit send).