Word: speller
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Matter of Course. He was born in Nevada in a covered wagon, grew up in the Arizona Territory. His father was a rancher, but Henry himself had dreams of greater glory. In his blue-backed speller, when he was ten, he wrote: "Henry Fountain Ashurst, U.S. Senator from Arizona." To develop his voice, the young cowboy rode into the hills to address the landscape. He exhorted the boulders to rise against the iron heel of oppression. He demanded of the mountains that they nominate Grant for a third term. While other cowpunchers twanged The Old Chisholm Trail, Ashurst (who knew...
...Whitman kept writing to the boys, although few answered. One exception was Peter Doyle, a veteran who worked as a conductor on the Washington-Georgetown City Railroad. For all his fond words to his "own loving boys" and his pathetic promise to make Pete "a correct speller & real handsome writer," he would get in return something like this: "i cant rite so good as the car is in motion...
Thriving on dissatisfaction with public schools, 3R bans every possible "frill"-dances, student government, fund drives, P.T.A., and all athletics except for daily calisthenics. For a tuition of $900 a year, it offers old-fashioned work, using McGuffey and Noah Webster's 1783 Bluebook Speller (last revised in 1906). The only concession to modernity is grouping by ability in each subject, not by grades, so students can whiz through faster. Every 3R kindergartener writes and understands numbers up to 25, and some to 100. They begin reading at 4½. And it's all done without student geniuses...
...small town of Spencer, Ind. one night last week, Hardware Dealer Richard Lewis dropped in on the school board meeting to raise a point of order. His son Timothy, 10, is an ace speller-according to the 100 grades he gets on fifth-grade tests at school. But when it comes to writing, Timothy can't spell, not even such simple words as had, they and built. Like many a U.S. student, he has learned to memorize only what he needs to know for a quiz. "I don't think I'm getting the benefit...
Shirts & Sugar. They arrived six months later, and, with the King's reluctant permission, set up Protestant missions, devised a Hawaiian alphabet, soon printed a speller, began teaching eager natives, turned out countless yards of cambric Mother Hubbards, shirts and suits (the King ordered a dozen fancy shirts and a broadcloth jacket), promoted monogamy, introduced the spare, hardy architecture of New England whaling ports. A few years later Kamehameha III signed the "Hawaiian Magna Charta," thus paved the way for parliamentary government...