The headline read, “5th grade students thought these two teachers were dating—but watch how one addresses the rumor.”
And the blurb was a quote from one of the two teachers in the story: “Raise your hand if you have heard a rumor about Ms. Barker and I.”
Not surprisingly, the comment that floated to the top of the feed was one calling attention to the teacher’s grammar, pointing out that the correct form would have been “about Ms. Barker and me.”
And the reason the comment rose so high, was that people flooded in to tell the commenter that she was wrong—the correct form, many people insisted, is “about Ms. Barker and I.”
There were those who merely observed something along the lines of, “He was speaking, not writing, and it was an emotional situation. It’s pretty normal, in the course of speech, to say something ungrammatical.”
Fair enough.
Some people objected, “But he’s a math teacher! Don’t knock him for getting grammar wrong.”
First, I would hope that all teachers would have a good command of English, regardless of their particular subject matter. I’ll come back to that with the question of prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar.
Second, the logic behind the correct form feels almost mathematical to me, so it’s hardly a strong defense of the speaker to say, “He’s a mathematician.” I’ll come back to this as well.
The most striking thing in the comment thread was how many people piled in to say the teacher was right.
There was the simple snark, telling the commenter to go ask her English teacher for a refund.
Some correctors of the corrector were quite emphatic:
This is an issue that needs to be addressed by Departments of Education - it just proves that people do not know how to use grammar correctly, when people are correcting those who ARE GRAMMATICALLY correct. "Mrs Baker and I" is absolutely correct.Or, “It’s The King and I, not The King and Me”
Ad infinitum.
What’s at play here is presumably the classic over-correction. As a kid, someone said, “Me and Joey were at the park,” and a parent or teacher said, “No, the proper form is, ‘Joey and I were at the park’.”
The correctee just remembered the form “___ and I,” without ever understanding that they were being corrected on two issues simultaneously, one of etiquette (putting others first) and one of grammar (subject vs. object pronouns).
And this is where I see the parallel to math.
