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There’s a big difference between “Let’s eat, kids!” and “Let’s eat kids!” As the joke has it, punctuation saves lives. Some of us, myself included, believe good grammar is a critical component of both written and spoken communication. In particular, when writing, “you’re” (cringe!) spelling, structural and punctuation errors leap from the page and slap the grammar fan in the face.

But in the era of rampant text-messaging and communication via virtual walls, bad spellers seem “untied” and grammarians seem fated to go the way of the dodo (2 bad 4 u guyz!!). But at least one school in Missouri is trying to plug the grammar gap.

Summit Christian Academy in Missouri has released a new policy, effective in January, stating that students will have to rewrite their papers if they have more than five grammatical errors. On the rewrite, however, they won’t be able to get anything higher than 75%.

“Students and parents were somewhat shocked to hear these changes,” wrote a Summit Christian Academy student reporter. ”The immediate reaction from the student body was that the changes were too harsh.”

“We have some who are thrilled and others who are highly concerned because it’s tied to scholarship dollars,” the academy’s principal, Kim Gill, told media blogger Jim Romenesko.

Do you think the school is being too harsh, or do kids these days need some grammarian tough love?

More (grammatically correct) stories from TODAY Moms:
The most popular baby names of 2012, revealed
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Restaurant's baby surcharge dishes up outrage

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If you were asked to quickly jot down a grocery list, would you type it into your smartphone? Or print it? Or use cursive writing?

Assuming you’re a fan of pen/paper, logic would dictate you’d use the fastest, easiest method possible. That’s cursive. It flows from letter to letter, it bounces from word to word, it dances from thought to thought.

So why do most of us end up printing (or using some form of barely legible block letters)?  Because we, my friends, have reached the beginning of the end of cursive handwriting.

Computers in the classroom have left little time for educators to teach print, cursive and typing. Something had to give. It certainly wasn't going to be math or science. Instead, it's cursive.  Today, 44 states no longer mandate teaching cursive in the classrooms. Of those 44, two of them--Indiana and Hawaii-- have taken it out of the curriculum completely. That means kids are still learning to print their letters as they always have, but the transition is slowly moving away from print-to-cursive to print-to-typing.

Can we blame the system? Don't we all remember painfully inching our way through the cursive alphabet day after day? Those capitol Q's and Z's and L's.....they were nearly impossible! And how many of us are using that darn floppy flow of our ABC's today?

But wait, maybe I'm remembering it all wrong. Maybe students today do like it more than I did. There was only one way to find out. 

We visited a 3^rd grade class in Nashville, Tenn., to poll a group of young writers. We asked them which writing method they prefer: print or cursive. The entire class said print (mainly because cursive, at the 3rd grade level is as laborious as painting the Statue of Liberty with a toothbrush). We then asked if they'd prefer to print or type and nearly all said they'd rather type. 

So if teachers are shying away from cursive, and adults are shying away from cursive, and even kids are shying away from cursive, what's the problem? Why can't we just do away with it? Well without cursive, we couldn't sign a check, couldn't read the Declaration of Independence, and we definitely couldn't become big and famous because how would we sign our autograph? 

The other side of the argument is a little more practical. Cursive is supposed to make things easier for us. In an age where we're doing twice as much twice as fast, you'd think you'd want an easier way to write. The only problem is, people are doing less writing and more typing. Is there a lesson lost if we give up the loopy letters? Are we teaching our kids that if something is too difficult to learn, then they might as well not learn it?

Bottom line, computers are the wave of the future and will only be playing a bigger and bigger role in our classrooms. Will it come at the total expense of cursive? Only time will tell. 

What do you think? Would you want cursive phased out of your kids' curriculum?

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Every new school year bring new freedoms -- and responsibilities.

Click here to take the TODAY/Parenting.com back-to-school survey!

Rebecca Wilson / AP file

New school year, new rules? How do you decide when your kids will walk to school alone, and other school-related freedoms?

Is this the year your child walks to school by himself? The year you take a hands-off policy and trust her to get homework done on her own? When is it OK to let a kid come home to an empty house? Do you pick their clothes each day or let them express their unique fashion sense?

Parenting.com and TODAY are teaming up to survey parents on when you let your kids take on more school-related responsibility. Click on this link to take the survey.

And TODAY Moms would love to hear more about how you decide when the time is right for these various milestones. Do you go by what your kids' friends are doing? What your own parents did? Do you have in-depth discussions about it, or just go with your gut? Please take the survey, then share your thoughts in the comments below.

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As you shop for cool backpacks and eco-friendly lunch bags for the new school year, does part of you start to agonize about what really happens once your child walks through the big school doors?

And which do you worry about more: academics or social life? With academics you can get into a panic thinking since your kid isn’t doing well in math, she won’t get into college, or find a good job. But if your child lacks friends, you may worry that she’ll be teased and forever pegged as an outcast. 

With schoolwork you can hire a tutor, or do extra work at home to help your child. But if she lacks friends, you can’t tag along and be her buddy, or make other kids like her – and that can break your heart.

In a recent poll, iVillage.com found that 64 percent of moms worry about their child making friends at school. When asked if their kid has a hard time making friends, 71 percent said yes.

Experts shared their advice on how to help kids make friends:

-Family psychotherapist Fran Walfish, author of The Self-Aware Parent, suggests modeling friendly behavior. How you relate to your kids is how they’ll relate with their peers, she says.

-Don’t be afraid to tap into the teacher’s knowledge. Teachers often know which kids need help with friends, says Julia Simens, author of “Emotional Resilience and the Expat Child.” Teachers can help kids connect socially.

-Help your child learn to break the ice by practicing break-the-ice one-liners, such as, “I like your boots,” or “I like the colors you picked. Can I help you paint?”

Which do you worry about more heading into the school year, academics or the social scene? What have you done to help your child get ready for school, whether it's working on reading or practicing social skills?  Or are you pretty relaxed about the new school year?

Julie Weingarden Dubin is a Michigan-based freelance journalist and author with three rocking kids, a loving husband and a trashed minivan. She covers health, psychology, parenting, relationships and pop culture.

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Regarding the ongoing quandary over teachers friending students on Facebook, the Ontario College of Teachers came up with an answer so obvious, other school systems should promptly face-palm upon hearing it: Just don't do it.

That's right, kids. The regulatory board for all public teachers in Ontario, Canada, essentially forbids its 230,000 members from accepting Facebook friend requests from students, All Facebook reports:

The Ontario College of Teachers’ websiteincludes a copy of an eight-page "Professional Advisory on the Use of Electronic Communication and Social Media" ... outlin[ing] appropriate conduct for electronic messages, complete with explanations of criminal and civil law implications. Teachers are instructed to only communicate with students electronically during "appropriate times of the day and through established education platforms."

See how easy?

No hand-wringing. No Puritanical finger-wagging. No rending of garments while howling, "Won't somebody please think of the children?" In an example that should be followed throughout Canada, and most certainly the United States, the Ontario advisory acknowledges that Facebook and the Internet are facts of life, as well as a useful tool when directions are followed:

Facebook is not banned from the classroom. Facebook pages or groups established for classroom use are allowed — as is most other social media. However, teachers are strictly forbidden to communicate with students through any personal means, such as private instant messages or through personal Facebook profiles.

According to the advisory, teachers must decline student-initiated friend requests, and never initiate a friend request with a student. The college asserts that when a teacher and a student become friends in an online environment, the dynamic between them is forever changed. An invisible line between professional and personal is crossed, which can lead to strictly forbidden informal conversations.

The report also says that teachers who post inflammatory comments on social media — even if those comments are meant to be private — can be fired and/or criminally prosecuted. It also states that teachers are always "on duty" and bound by "certain standards of conduct."

In its entirety, the advisory may seem a bit extreme. Then again, if U.S. schools adopted such a simple policy, there'd be no wondering what's to be done about the Chicago teacher who posted a photo of her 7-year-old student whom she snapped with her cellphone, along with mocking comments about the little girl's hair. There'd be protocol for the teacher who called her first-grade students "future criminals" on a Facebook post open for all to see.

Granted, there are far more good teachers than the few that make the news. If we lived in a world where people had the Internet all figured out, teachers and students friending each other might be an awesome idea. But the majority of us don't even understand basic privacy settings, and the potential for chaos far outweighs any possible benefits of student/teacher Facebook fraternization.

That doesn't mean teachers should pretend Facebook and the Internet doesn't exist.

Ontario College of Teachers report is accompanied by this 6-minute video (below) that is as charming, in its un-jaded Internet 101 approach to social media in the classroom, as it is realistic and informative.

(They say "aboot" a lot.)

Throughout the video, you'll hear school administrators, teachers and at least one "social media expert" talk about how social media is now a student's main window on the world, that it can, and is, used in the classroom, and that it is a disservice to students not to instruct them on how things work on the Internet.

Same goes for teachers.

via All Facebook

More on the annoying way we live now:

Library solves porn problem by moving computers

Students asked to out public schools that block pro-gay sites

Kids on Rebecca Black's 'Friday': 'Dessert with a pig on top'

Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook.  

First peanuts, now Axe body spray?

The mother of an allergic teen in Indiana is suing her son's school district to try to force his high school to ban perfume and body sprays, which she says can trigger a life-threatening allergic reaction in her son.

Many elementary school districts have banned peanut butter from the lunchrooms in order to protect children with severe peanut allergies.
It's unclear whether the 17-year-old Indiana boy is truly allergic to perfumes, or if they simply irritate his asthma. Regardless, Janice Zandi's lawsuit has the potential to broaden the responsibility of school districts to respond to students' allergies.

According to court documents, ABCNews.com reported, the school's principal told the mother in the case that all she could do was ask students to limit their in-school use of perfume and cologne sprays, and allegedly said that the boy "just has bad genes."

What do you think? With all the different allergies out there today, how should schools respond? Is a ban the answer?

Related story: Cats on a plane? Allergy sufferers can't escape.

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Pasco County School District

UPDATE: The backpack brouhaha is over. Nine-year-old Quentin Ferrer decided to bring a different backpack to school on Thursday, after the racy illustration on his old backpack stirred up controversy. "He said, 'I felt uncomfortable at school,' " Fred Ferrer, Quentin's dad, told The St. Petersburg Times. "He said, 'I don't want you to get in trouble.' So we went out and bought two new backpacks."

Quentin Ferrer’s backpack isn’t your standard L.L. Bean model: The 9-year-old’s bag sports an illustration of a buxom, bikini-clad woman drawn in the style of a classic tattoo. The fourth-grader has been carrying it to school for two years, but another parent recently noticed the racy illustration and complained. The principal of Richey Elementary, north of Tampa, Fla., told Quentin to leave the backpack at home. But the boy’s father, Fred Ferrer, refused, saying the picture isn’t pornographic and doesn’t show drugs, weapons or violence. The principal compromised by allowing the boy to bring the backpack to school, but leave it in his office during the day. Fred Ferrer tells Tampa Bay Online he thinks that’s unacceptable, and threatened to dress his son in similarly styled shirts to make his point.

What do you think? Was the principal right? Is this backpack too racy for elementary school?

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