More Examination Blunders.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 13, 27 March 1902, Page 2

More Examination Blunders.

Of examination blunders as of making books it may be truly said there is no end, and recent examination results show that both in point of quantity and quality the steady supply of past years is being fully maintained, A common drawback to the collections usually published of amusing schoolboy blunders is that the best of them generally show by strong internal evidence that they are not genuine, but that they are only made funny by being judiciously ' faked.' A writer in the London Spectator —apparently a School Board Inspector —has just published a collection, however, which he-claims have the merit of being strictly authentic, having come within his own experience during the past few years. They have, moreover, the additional interest of being blunders committed not by young people, but by teachers actually engaged in the work of education, and after reading them one cannot wonder that the supply of schoolboy blunders continues to be so unfailing. Sometimes the mistake arises through the use of a wrong word, the examinee being misled by an unfortunate similarity in sound. Thus, for example, one candidate wrote that the 'pheasants 'rose under Wat Tyler at the 'fragrant' injustice of the Poll-tax, and that they demanded ' manual sufferance.' ' Fragrant' injustice is certainly good. A common device of of the examinee when in difficulties is to try to wotk out an answer by the app irent meaning ol some word in the question, and this often leads to cut ions results. • i'hus, in the experience of the writer fiom whom we are quoting, a laiitudinarian was variously explaimd as 'one who believed in having the Church service read in Latin'; ' one not ashamed to confess his code of religion, no matter in whit latitude he may find himself,' and as ' a geographical term —one who studies the various latitudes of difierent countries.' Sometimes the humor is of the purely unconscious kind. Thus —' the chief benefit of the revival of learning was that newspapers began to be published and gas was used more freely.' ' The chief event in the Reformation was that Martin Luther publicly sold indulgences.' That is very hard on Luther. ' Nelson,' we are told, ' was famous for his short poem, " England expects every man to do his duty."' Still more surpn-ing is the historical information supplied about Dunstan. ' Duiibtan,' writes one, 'improved the celebracy of the clergy', and anothei goes one better with the following : ' Dunstan was an Italian. Me was taught music and literature by the wandtnng Jews of Ireland.' There are many other historical gems in the collection, but these are perhaps about the best.

The foregoing disquisition on Dunstan is almost paralleled by a composition handed in a week or two ago to the teacher of one of our Otago up-country schools by one of his female pupils on another great ecclesiastic — viz , Anselm. There can be no doubt as to the genuireness of this production, for the original now lies before us, and with it we close our collection. This is — literatim et verbatim — how it runs: — -'When St. Anselm was in England, on a visit, he got word from the King to come back, and he named him Archbishop of Canterbury. When Anselm heard the news he grew very pale. He was born in ten thirty-three in Italy, and became a monk in the Abbey of Bee, in Normandy, who afterwards became a prior of Bee. Anselm refused to be made Archbishop of Canterbury, and he was d'agged to .the X n^'s bedside, where he refused to hold the pastoral statf. Anselm had a school, and all the scholars went to him to hear his teaching, so he was called Scholastic Philosophy. He did did not leave the Norman monastery till his whole course of hie became a mitred ciper.'