Purple Dittoes!

I think when they tore down the old building they probably found some of my old purples dittoes from the ‘70s. I was a packrat. Hey, you never know when you might need this. Anybody need some 5.25" floppies? 

But I was reminded of the joys of the ditto machine (see Spirit Duplicator) in a response to my post on the building. In the early '70s Xerox was just a company, not a machine, and we didn’t have one in any case. Want copies? Type on a ditto, which, when run through a machine with an alcohol-based wick, made lovely purple facsimiles of varying quality, although freshly run copies also often went directly to the noses of some students. I doubt there was any long-lasting effect, but hey, it was the '70s and anything was worth a try!

One problem. Well, frequently more than one, especially if you weren’t a great typist (on a manual typewriter my first couple years; gunky white-out was not an option). There was no way to correct a typo. Your options were to start over (and I remember, clearly and painfully, using 10-12 dittoes to type a 5-6+ page supplemental short story, article, essay, play, etc., because books never quite had the piece I wanted, and I was unwilling to settle for the “wrong” story – it was hard enough to get kids to read stuff, and if even I didn’t like it....) or type over the error, leaving purple slashes and scars throughout the page. I could usually tolerate one or two mistakes, but then I would feel the need to retype the whole page.

I do remember a test, however, given to the class that easily wins my prize for “Worst.Class.Ever.” (24 boys, 4 girls, freshman English. We’ll leave the year and other details unmentioned.) In any case, we had spent half of the first quarter doing grammar and parts of speech, with the promise, “We'll get this out of the way and then we can do some stuff that’s more fun.” I gave a test at the end of this segment. I transferred the one kid who passed it to another class and started over.

After another 5 weeks, this time focusing just on nouns and pronouns, came a new test. I’m not sure which is my favorite answer. Fill in the blank: “Proper nouns begin with _____________.” Student answer: “The letter P.” But I think that’s topped by the paragraph containing 20 nouns (or pronouns, or perhaps both), to be underlined. Perhaps the man, who is, in fact, a friend on Facebook, will remember underlining a purple splotch to reach the magic number. He doesn’t have to admit it. He was one of three in the class who would actually graduate.

One more anecdote from that class. Actually, there are many, but most are too painful to repeat. Back in the day we were allowed student aides, and they could actually do some grading. I had assigned some grammar exercise from the book and passed off the papers to my aide. She quickly came back to me and hesitatingly asked, “Mr. Berndt? Did you give me the right key? Because this kid only got 1 of the 20 questions right?” I checked, and, embarrassed, had to apologize because indeed, I had given her the wrong answer key. Sadly for this unlucky student, when she used the right key his score went down.