My rant against McDonalds

I have a bone to pick with McDonalds. It's not about calories, changing the french fry oil or trying to make me feel guilty when I still order a quarterpounder with cheese when there are good salads on the menu now. It is about their placemat.

I teach English. Every day, almost, I battle 7th graders over silly things like capitalizing proper nouns or spelling words correctly. I even have noticed this year more than ever(or just last year since this is only my 2nd year teaching) that capitalizing the letter i when using it in the first person tense is not happening. Teaching the conventions of our wacky English language is a challenge, let me tell you.

So, about three weeks ago Troy and I were eating at McDonalds when I looked down at the placemat. This is what it said more or less, exactly written this way.

"i like eating at mcdonalds. i can always find something to satisfy my hunger. i like..."

Not one single word was capitalized. Are you kidding me? Doesn't McDonalds know that kids learn from environmental print and that if they see on a placemat at McDonalds that no letters are capitalized, they think that's normal? It's bad enough that I have to fight my students about im-ing versus real English, standards for emails versus essays, but for an actual advertising campaign by one of the biggest worldwide companies to ignore all conventions of the English language is too much. I was livid. My poor husband got the brunt of this rant right there in the restaurant.

So the placemat was bad enough but then I remember the slogan. "im loving it." No caps, no apostrophe. What the heck?!!

Then I was driving down the street and there's Taco Bell with a big ol' sign plastered to their window that says "grilled stuft burrito." My 7th graders will actually think that is how you spell stuffed. Is it that much cooler, Taco Bell, to have stuft than stuffed? Is it worth ruining the minds of our future doctors, lawyers, teachers and leaders?

Okay, so I know this is a little over the top, but seriously. What you see is what you do. Kids have little impressionable minds and this is not the impression we should be giving them.

I will never write my blogs in all lower case or with cheesy abbreviations or no punctuation. I will have mistakes but not intentionally. I am fighting here, people! I am an English teacher to the death...or at least until I can find a part time job that pays well.

Okay, I am done.