On the trail with Quayle

   In many years of substituting, and working in classrooms of other teachers, you acquire some weird insights into the educational process.  One teacher was using mnemonics to help her third grade students with the spelling of geographic names.  "Just remember," she pointed out, "there's a "trail" in Aus-trail-ia."   There isn't really anything a substitute teacher can do about that type of mistake; there's no good way to handle it, and after all, it's not a matter of life and death.  But that teacher's learning device stuck;  their high school history teacher years later would comment that almost all her classes would consistently misspell that continent.