Justin McKey is a high school student who was handed an interesting assignment:

I was sitting in Chemistry class today and my teacher gave us the strangest assignment. She told us that we would be writing a summary about a paragraph in the Chemistry book, concerning Phospholipids. But here’s the twist. I would be required to write the summary in text message form (whatever that is) and to use abbreviation wherever possible. I then told her that some people use T-9 and/or predictive text input and don’t really abbreviate. She then told me that I should just use bad grammar and instead of writing, for example, “you” to write the letter u. And to use things like lol and cu8tr. I thought this might interest you since your involved in both English and technology. As you can imagine, this was a concern to me.

I totally agree and love the idea of integrating technology into the classroom, with use of Smart Boards and notebook computers. But of course there’s boundaries, such as using cell phones to text in class or cheat on a test. However, there seems to be an even more appalling feature. And that is poor or bad English. I know you’ve probably come across this since your emailed so frequently, and I’ve probably made several mistakes in this email as well. Now I’m not trying to say that texting inhibits degradation to a lower level (of) society. I think that proper English and technology can, and should become one.

According to my teacher the faculty had a meeting held by Sandy Garret, the State Superintendent, instructing them to incorporate text “lingo” into school curriculum. Am I the only person that is frightened by this?! It’s like the schools have given up and are accepting the false fact that students can’t speak/write in proper English. Think about our Constitution becoming a bunch of “lol’s” and “wtf george what’s wid the taxes”! Absolutely ridiculous.

Well, I do say “W-T-F” in conversation – but never “L-O-L.”