Language Arts Standards And the Possessive 'Apoxtrophe'

By Edgar H. Schuster

Virtually everyone in politics these days is in favor of Tough Standards, and most of these advocates also approve of tests to measure whether the standards are being attained. Though much attention and money have been thrown at these two items, far too little serious attention has been paid to getting from the standards to their attainment. It is the thesis of this essay that the attainment of even the most elementary standards—in language arts, at least—is likely to involve staggering complexities.

My example will be the possessive apostrophe, but I could just as easily and with the same result have chosen any one of a hundred other objectives—the semicolon, the topic sentence, any principle of style or usage, the paragraph, the notion of sentence completeness, any one of the parts of speech. You name it.

A particularly good feature of the apostrophe objective is that everyone is in favor of kids' mastering it. No literate person wants to find under his windshield an item like the flier I recently found under mine advertising a new local eatery that was featuring pie's and cake's. (I admit I haven't patronized the place; I'm too afraid of germ's.) Note that one of the grade 3-5 objectives of the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning, also known as McREL, is that "[the student] uses apostrophes in...