Spot the Irony

Today, while accompanying my brother to the doctor for a brief checkup before he left for college (I'll post about that later), I sat in the waiting room and read that bastion of journalistic integrity, Nick Magazine. One of the articles was a collection of "strange but true" stories in honor of the back to school season. A lot of the stories sounded like urban legends, but one story in particular stood out to me:

A Miami artist was paid $40,000 to design a mural for a new library. This mural contained pictures and names of 175 famous artists, writers, and scholars. Well, when the mural was unveiled, it turns out that ELEVEN OF THE NAMES WERE SPELLED INCORRECTLY. And we're talking about names that everyone knows, like Shakespeare, Einstein, and Van Gogh.

Obviously, the library asked the artist to fix it. Citizens wrote to complain. And here's where it gets fun: the artist was not embarassed by her mistakes, nor did she apologize for making them. Quite the contrary: she was OFFENDED that people would actually complain about such a thing. She couldn't understand what all the fuss was about, and thought they were just complaining because she was Mexican. She actually charged the library a $6000 fee to make the corrections.

I Googled the story this evening, and found out that it is indeed true. There's just something so ironic about the whole thing, and rather sad.

See, this is why I hate hate hate it when schools place more emphasis on self-esteem than on learning skills. I've noticed this shift in the time from when I was in elementary and middle school to now, with my sister in middle school. Why should we praise someone who does not do a satisfactory job? Is an award really an honor if every child in the grade gets one? The library and the town had every right to be upset with this woman. Who cares about her ethnicity? She made an idiotic mistake.

Oh my God, it's September already...