Editorial: To err is human
“Prime Ministers make mistakes, lawyers make mistakes…” – Keishawn Thomas (July 2020)
IT is profoundly ironic, at a time when the various media of public communication, social and otherwise, are suffused with the slogan “Black Lives Matter”, that some miscreant would seek to humiliate a bright, black eleven-year-old Barbadian child to such an extent that, in his own reported words, “he did not feel like living.”
Little Keishawn Thomas, together with thousands of his local contemporaries, took the Barbados Secondary School Entrance Examination on Tuesday of last week. Thereafter, as has become the norm in recent years, he went to a restaurant to celebrate their completion of his rite of educational passage with the other members of his St. Mary’s Primary School cohort. It would have been a bittersweet occasion; examination completed, yes, but after four years together, almost half their young lives, they had come to an end of one phase of their existence and, after September, they would never be in the same classroom together again and, in many cases, not even be in the same school.
A reporter, present at the event, thought that an interview with one or two of the children would be newsworthy. So he inquired of Keishawn as to his experience in the test.
In exuberant mood, Keishawn replied, “The maths was hard, but I still get it did…” “Done”, he corrected himself almost immediately, his tongue clearly having tripped over the expression as it came out and the thought ‘but I did it’. It can happen to most of us, no matter our level of intellect and we are sure that there is a word in the literature for it.
According to one writer: “Part of the reason why I love writing so much is the clear connection between my thoughts and my hands that type them. Speaking for me is entirely different. I find myself having a disconnect between my thoughts and my speech quite often. It’s like the pathway from my brain to my mouth is the Oregon trail, and along the way, words die-off from dysentery. This will leads to situations where I will be unable to communicate what I was just thinking properly with sentences that quite frankly are wrong, faulty, or just jumbled enough to be nonsensical.”
Cruelly, in Keishawn’s case, someone thought that it would be clever and funny if he or she were to omit the correction and leave the ungrammatical portion for public exposure. Thus, with the cover of anonymity that social media affords to the cowardly and the malicious alike, the clip was posted that same night and, in modern-speak, went viral. We saw comments such as “He failed English for sure” and “Let us hear about the English”, even though, we feel certain, many Barbadians would have asserted, in Keishawn’s stead, “but we still get it do” bereft of any correction.
Days later, after the story broke, however, Barbadians generally seemed to have been overcome with remorse and, seemingly, to a man and a woman, feted Keishawn and showered him with gifts.
Yes, we agree that secondary school will not be an easy ride, children make fun even of others with physical disabilities; and we can all remember some classroom mispronunciation or misstatement of long ago that still evokes a grin today.
Nonetheless, to Keishawn we say, to err is human, to be wise enough to correct one’s errors is a sign of greatness. We hope that you will succeed beyond your dreams at your new school come September.