Secretary

Missy wants to be Secretary for the school student council. She turned in the paperwork and insisted on making a poster.

I stopped by the store on the way home from work and bought a poster board. When I got home with it, I instructed Missy to lay out how she wanted her poster on a plain sheet of paper first. Once she knew what she was going to do, then she could use a pencil and draw it out on the poster board.

She did lay out the design on the plain paper, but not very tidily. Then she started on the poster with the pencil. As she was doing this, I saw that she had misspelled the word 'Secretary'. I told her to check it and she insisted that it was right.

"No, it's not. Check again."

"Yes it is!"

"No, you are missing the first 'r'. You have the information sheet right there, use it to get the spelling correct."

Then in a small voice,

".... Oh ...."

Right. She then corrected 'secretary'. I told her that was the reason for doing it in pencil first and to make sure to check over everything very carefully. Then I left to do other things.

When she announced that she was done with the pencil and was ready to move on to the markers, I came in to look it over.

Instead of drawing the words exactly as she would trace them with the markers, she had done the second half (her motto) very quickly and it was rather sloppy. It definitely should not be traced. So, I told her she needed to clean it up, erase the messy parts and get it looking just the way she wanted before starting with the markers.

She went back to work and fixed it up a bit. Then she started with the markers.

It was getting close to bedtime, so I began helping her by coloring with another colored marker on other words. She finished her name and wanted to add some glitter highlighting to her name, so she did that. Unfortunately, she is too quick about doing each step, and the highlighting didn't look fantastic.

It was getting late, we were too far behind, and she needed to get to bed. So, I told her I would finish up the rest for her, which was just coloring in letters with the marker.

I sent her off to bed.

Later, I returned to the poster and finished the coloring. I worked at tidying up the edges of the letters, filling in thin spots, and generally doing what I could make it look the best I could.

After declaring it complete, I got my camera to take a picture. I placed the poster in the middle of the table, stood up on a chair and aimed to take the picture.

As I was centering the poster in the camera display, I froze.

She was not going to be able to take this poster to school the next day.




















I was so disappointed and frustrated.

When she got up the next morning, I told her she wasn't going to be able to take it to school.

"Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy???"

"Go look at it."

(long pause while studying the poster)

"What? I don't see anything."

"Look again."

(pause)

"I still don't see what's wrong."

"Check your name."

In the tiniest of voices,

"Oh."

After a bit, she said she could squeeze it in. I told her, no, she couldn't. It was too obvious.

I bought another poster board later that afternoon.




When running for an office that involves note taking, typing, and the like, one should not hang a poster with a misspelled name that has been unmistakeably corrected.


Here is the second poster. Much better, Missy!