Wheel of Fortune’s Teachers’ Week Gaffe Could Not Have Come at a Worse Time

Wheel of Fortune‘s Teachers’ Week has turned into an unexpected English lesson.

During the game show’s annual celebration of educators, several eagle-eyed viewers (as first noted by TV Insider) have noticed a punctuation mistake in Wheel of Fortune‘s graphics for the week. The graphics read “Teacher’s Week,” but because Wheel is honoring all teachers and not just one, the correct spelling would be Teachers’ Week, with the apostrophe at the end of the word.

“Shouldn’t it be Teachers’ Week, meaning all teachers?” an X (fka Twitter) user wrote in response to one of Wheel‘s promotional Teachers’ Week videos on Monday. Another user posted a photo of one of the mis-punctuated graphics on Tuesday, writing, “Is Wheel of Fortune celebrating one teacher or all teachers?”

A Sony rep has pointed out that viewers annually raise the punctuation question, which prompted host Pat Sajak to address the controversy last season. “We’ve chosen to honor a teacher as a being, kind of like Father’s Day,” he said during last year’s Teachers’ Week. “There’s more than one father, but we treat it as a singular possessive. That’s all I’ve got!”

Viewers have also likely noticed another change during Wheel‘s Teachers’ Week: Longtime letter turner Vanna White is absent from this week’s episodes, having contracted COVID when they were filmed in late July. In her stead, California-based Teacher of the Year recipient Bridgette Donald-Blue is assisting with the puzzles all week.

When White’s anticipated absence from Teachers’ Week was first reported in August, she had been in the middle of tense contract negotiations, seeking a sizable salary bump after news broke of Sajak’s upcoming departure from the show. She has since resolved the contract dispute, though financial terms of her new deal were not disclosed; she’ll now be sticking around through at least Summer 2026, and will be joined next fall by new Wheel host Ryan Seacrest.