State Educators and Bad Punctuation

I'm embarrassed to say that I often find educators on every level who don't know some of the fundamentals of punctuation.  Here's one of the basics.  In America, commas and periods go inside final quotation marks.  Schenck pointed out that "commas and periods go inside final quotation marks."  See where I put the period.  That's how we do it in America.

Now mind you, the British way of doing it makes more sense.  In England, commas and periods go outside quote marks, unless of course you are quoting a whole sentence, then the period is part of the quote.  But, for whatever reason, we don't do that here. I'll confess that I have bad thoughts when a fellow professor messes up on such basics, but I won't tell you what they are.

So I was downright disgusted yesterday to find that whoever put together the sample ISTEP materials on the State of Indiana website--for the samples having to do with writing--messed up on this basic.  Have the rules changed, I asked myself?  Rules do change and, as I mentioned, the British way does make more sense.  But I don't think they have.  I suspect, rather, that the state of education is so bad in the US that some on the state level of education don't know what they're doing.

It's not that punctuation is a big deal in real life.  I'm talking about educators and the people who direct educators.  In this realm, this sort of flub calls into question your competency as an educator.

I leave you with a homework assignment my son brought home the other day asking which was more: 0.01 grams or 10 milligrams.  I was puzzled: gram, decigram, centigram, milligram.  0.01 grams is a centigram, which is 10 milligrams.  I double checked myself, went online.  Yep, they're the same.  I had him write, "They're equal."

The teacher marked it wrong.