The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [111]
“Is there any way that somebody could fix that?”
“Tell you what,” he said, “if you write down the mistake, and which sign it was in, I’ll make sure to pass the note on to the right person.”
“Great!” said Benjamin, tearing out a page from his ever-present poetry notebook. He checked the Spectacle Island brochure and found the sign’s number, then noted that down along with the error.
“It may or may not take an act of Congress to get that fixed, though,” the old ranger joked.
We thanked him, collected Jane, and walked out of the office, feeling a familiar brand of satisfaction wash over us. The ranger had been glad to hear about the error when we brought it up congenially and directly. Our conversation with him now reinforced my certainty that we had steered back onto the correct track. Stealth corrections had no place in the League, and probably never should have. As we waited for the ferry to arrive and convey us to Georges Island, I reflected that the most rewarding moments of the TEAL trip had not been when we successfully carried out covert alterations, but when we had engaged with people in honest conversations about spelling and grammar. Our countrymen hadn’t always wanted to hear what we had to say, but the times that they did made it all worth it. Realizing this was one positive result to come out of the Grand Canyon disaster. We’d had as much to learn as anyone else.
“Are you really thinking about a second tour?” I asked Benjamin later that afternoon, as we toured Fort Warren, a Civil War–era POW camp on Georges Island.
“Haven’t you been?” he shot back. He walked carefully along the stone borders of old gun emplacements.
I admitted that I had. I could already feel the barest tingling of a need to get back on the road, to dive once more into the murky pool of modern grammatical realities. Not right away, but sometime within the next year. And this time we’d arm ourselves with more tools to edify than just the Kit. Knowing what we knew now, we could make a bigger difference in American literacy. In fact, we could start working on our broader goals long before we hit the road again.
On Benjamin’s second leg of my original typo hunt, we’d begun to reimagine TEAL’s mission. A second quest would have to take that altered vision into account. Even if we hunted down typos and—with permission, of course—fixed them, that might not be our sole mission. I didn’t know how it would look yet, but already I had visions of replacing “Typo Hunt” with “Editor’s Quest” … or something like that.
Even as Benjamin spurred me to voice these ideas and recognize that I couldn’t not embark on a second journey, we had to address the other half of TEAL’s mission: education. People couldn’t be their own editors if they didn’t fully understand the mechanisms of grammar and spelling. Even as we worked to sharpen the editing skills of the present generation, TEAL had to proactively enable the next generation of communicators.
Benjamin had made this half a personal focus, as he related most to this part of the mission. He’d teetered on the brink of plunging into a teaching career, had brought up the possibility occasionally, back when we shared a Maryland apartment. During our year of probation he’d returned to spelunk the halls of research that had so consumed him during the trip itself. He’d emerged dusty and triumphant, telling me excitedly that he had found the solution to the nation’s orthographic conundrum—and that it had been here all along, or at least for the last fifty years. Two days after we visited Spectacle Island, we joined with Callie and Authority in poignant reunion and drove a few miles over to Malden, Massachusetts. Benjamin had arranged for us to visit the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School.
We walked into a class of thirty children reading words aloud from a list in their books. It was a diverse crowd, for Massachusetts, anyway: besides the majority of white kids, there were also Hispanic, black,