The final lesson of the South Kitsap High School class of 2012 is one that is applicable to everyday life; review your work before turning it in.

The valuable lesson was presented in glowing color as students and educators began to notice, just before graduation ceremonies began Friday night, that the graduates’ medallions were misprinted.  “It’s a Matter of Prtde,” was one and the manufacturer, Jostens, also left the t out of Kitsap.

The lesson of reviewing your work joins other adulthood saving tips such as “Look before you leap” and “Sniff your drink before you gulp it” and “Credit is not real money no matter what ‘they’ tell you.”

Reviewing your work could one day save your job. There is at least one opening in the Jostens company, if a young graduate showing attention to detail is willing to move to Minnesota.

We well know the pressures of deadlining work and then sending it to press hoping that it’s mistake free. Errors invade newspapers today at a greater rate than any time in the last half century. That reality, and the letters readers send in telling of our misprints, keeps us off the high horse on this subject because the reality is we have left entire words out.

Hopefully some matriculating student will save their misprinted medallion rather than trade it for the corrected copy to come at a later date. Graduates that do keep the minted mistake can place it next to another icon of their youth, the first printing of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” in which the copyright page held the name Joanne Rowling instead of J.K. Rowling. The more literary of them could set the golden badge bearing mistakes next to the 1968 edition of Larry McMurtry’s “In a Narrow Grave,” which held so many errors that the edition bears one mistake in it’s cultural moniker, the “Skycrapper Edition” after a misspelling of skyscraper.

Few post enlightenment misprints can reach the significance of the 1631 edition of the King James Bible wherein the seventh commandment reads “thou shall commit adultery.”

Though the South Kitsap High School medallions may never reach the value of misprinted 1918 2 cent U.S. postage stamp known as the “Inverted Jenny,” one of which sold for $977,500 in 2007, the medals have the potential to serve students as a reminder to review  their work before turning it in.