I is For Ignotism

I’m a little behind with the A-Z Challenge – my classes were at the make-or-break point with grades, last day to withdraw without impacting next semester’s financial aid, so I had about 75 essays to grade.

And pretty much nothing else gets done when I have essays to grade.

Which, ironically, leads me to my word for I: ignotism.

Ignotism- noun. a mistake made from ignorance.

As a teacher this is a word I desperately need to know as I am dedicated to eradicating ignorance whenever it rears its uneducated head.

And why may not have known the actual word think I can say with 100% certainty that I am more than familiar with the application.

I see mistakes made from ignorance every day most of these are just pretty common everyday mistakes that I'm there to correct.

Some of them make me sad like a few years ago when I asked the question on a test to define simile and give an example. And one girl wrote "A simile is an expression you make when you're happy.  If I won the lottery, I would simile."

This after a week of lessons on similes and metaphors.

Other examples just make me shake my head. Like when we were writing about Jane Eyre and a student wrote "Rochester tried to blame Bertha for his problems but she was really just his escape goat."

And I had this vision of Rochester riding a goat off across the Moors.

Some examples of ignotism now make me laugh out loud. Like when I was teaching basic writing and I had the kids create a movie review for the movie The Princess Bride. One of my students, for whom English was a second language, was describing the scene when Buttercup was being captured by the pirates/kidnappers and she wrote the following:

"Buttercup was very scared when she saw the rubbers.  She knew the rubbers were dangerous and she just wanted to get away from the rubbers.  But the rubbers were all around her; there was no escaping the rubbers."

Best example of ignotism ever, I laughed until I cried.