The evolution of language:

Classes had only been in session a few weeks when eighth-grade English teacher Gayle Sands began to notice the curious shorthand and abbreviations creeping into her pupils' essays.

"The story introduces 2 diff. bus drivers," one girl wrote.

"She thinks she needs to defend the young people b/c she is young," scribbled another pupil.

With three computer-savvy teen-agers of her own, Sands instantly recognized the culprit: instant messaging.

With the casual lexicon of instant messaging, or IMing - where btw replaces by the way, where b4 substitutes for before and where 2 becomes the stand-in for to, two and too - infiltrating students' schoolwork, such mistakes are soaking up nearly as much red ink as the perennial spelling and grammar errors that typically catch teachers' eyes.

"It's not laziness. It's shorthand," said Sands, who teaches at Northwest Middle School in Taneytown. "A lot of the abbreviations they're using are good for note-taking. The trick is to teach them to separate it out from the formal writing in class."

Instant messaging has become the computerized version of passing notes in class. Like an on-screen conference call, kids can plunk down in front of a computer and strike up online conversations with friends who have access to the service.

So is there a problem?

For all the corrections required of students' IM shorthand, teachers acknowledge its academic benefits.

Every act of typing improves students' keyboarding skills, instructors say, and any writing, no matter how abbreviated, can be a good thing.