To think it's ok for a teacher to tell my son that he could have done better?

[crazygracieuk]

My son is 10 (Year 6) and doing well (level 5s etc..)

Last Friday he had homework where he had to find out 10 facts about the Alps and the teacher included some ideas of what to research.

Ds googled and then proceeded to copy and paste 10 sentences off the Internet. They were almost all very technical so incomprehensible to ds and me.

I told ds that I thought that he should have 10 facts that he can explain in his own words and that copy and pasting information that he doesn't understand is pointless.

I did not make him correct his homework as I honestly thought that his teacher would tell him that it was pretty poor but teacher ticked his work and wrote "Good Work " at the bottom!!!

Aibu to think that this is pretty poor form? Or is this typical in schools these days?

And google! Copy and pasting is not learning... It's plaigerism!

At a guess, I'd say that they don't correct every spelling mistake because it would be really disheartening for a child to hand in a brilliant piece of work, that answered the right questions, was well written and well formed, and then get it back with red pen all over it. If the only bad thing about a piece of geography work is spelling mistakes, then surely it would be better to focus on what is neccesary for that subject.

There should be some way of recording spelling mistakes though, so that children are prevented from getting into the habit of always spelling the same word wrong.

Good point slave but to only correct a couple of mistakes and leave the rest surely gives the child the impression that the uncorrected ones are correct when they're not. I like your idea... A spelling book, teacher rights incorrect spellings in the book for the child to learn.

Writes! FGS not rights!

When DD was in year 5 (I think) she was asked to find 10 facts about George V. As it happens I have several books about royalty, most of them pretty old e.g. 1937 and 1952 that were given to me by an elderly relative.

On this occasion I told DD she couldn't use the internet as there was plenty of material in these books and she could jolly well look it up.

She groaned and made heavy weather of it but she di it.

Did it help her learn more about George V? I don't think so, but five years on she still remembers it as the time Mummy got all medieval about the internet!

I don't object to copying and pasting as the start of the process. But that's what it should be used for - source material to interpret in a way that shows you understand what you've just grabbed downloaded from the internet.

I still remember being highly amused when ds1 (usually more organised) couldn't be arsed to paraphrase an essay on Martin Luther King and sent the whole copied and pasted screed in. His history teacher did not mark it. Instead it came back with the comment "Please tell Wikipedia to try harder next time".

I won't let my dcs copy and paste for homework they can look it up on the internet but then re word it they are yr 3 and yr 1.

However what does annoy me is the way dd gets her homeowork marked. She is yr 3, 2 weeks ago she spent ages doing her homework and was really proud of it. She handed it in and when it came back the teacher had just put a tick on it no well done no comment at all. Dd was quite disheartened by this. Last week she brought her homework home, she asked me to explain to her what she had to do.

I done this for her then she went on to do her own thing which wasn't what she was asked to do. Being a mean mummy I made her hand it in as it was in the hope the teacher would say something to her. When she recieved it back it just had a tick.

Now personally I think this is wrong if she hasn't done what was asked how can the teacher mark it. Don't even get me started about them not having enough sheets for all the pupils so some kids get 5 days including a weekend to do theirs and some get 1 night thats a whole new thread.

Captain - as slave says it's very disheartening to receive back your work covered in red (or any colour) corrections. Also if you are correcting every mistake the pupil is highly unlikely to take them all on board and learn the correct spellings, whereas if you draw their attention to one or two words they will (hopefully!) notice their mistake and learn the correct spelling.

I definitely shouldn't draw your attention to the fact that it's also common practice to just flick and tick glance over some of a pupil's work and only intensively mark certain pieces (or teachers would spend all their time marking). However this shouldn't apply to homework, particularly not when it's obviously been plagiarised although it does sound like that's what the OP's son's teacher has done.

I agree LeQueen however in many schools (mine included) we are told to correct the first 10 spellings and leave the rest. Many of us correct in pencil though as the pupils seem to respond better to that than red ink.

LeQueen I believe the theory behind the policy is that you will tackle the majority of the words that a child misspells this way eventually, you just won't be overwhelming them this way.

I do get very sniffy about work that has been word processed and handed in full of spelling mistakes, after all how long does it take to run the spellchecker! Incidentally this is the lazy child's approach to trying to get round caught out C&Ping - change a few of the words to have more interesting spellings so that it's clearly your own work! They are often quite shocked when you point out to them the website "their work" came from, even when they (and half the class) have used Wikipedia...

x-posted

LeQueen unfortunately I come across very few pupils whose spelling is that good! and of course I blame it all on the poor primary education they've received.

Education policies change all the time and I expect that (rightly!) spelling will become higher priority again eventually - most "new" policies are actually 20 years old (I haven't been teaching for that long but my faculty hordes hangs on to its old resources so I've seen the evidence of this!) or common sense dressed up with fancy new acronyms. Currently the ability to spell counts for very little in terms of GCSE or A level results, so it's hardly surprising that it's low priority in the eyes of many teachers who are so results driven thanks to the pressures put on them from above that they can barely see the pupils anyway.

I don't correct DS (7) homework. I leave it as it is. I will then go through things he's struggled with, correct spellings on a seperate sheet and put in the book.

His teacher needs to know what he can do alone, not me! But the corrections are helpful to DS and the teacher as she can see he;s getting there/ improving.

YANBU OP. but it's all in the wording of the homework.

It really depends on the child LeQueen.
DD thrives on knowing the right way to do things and is always eager to please. I have always corrected her spelling.
DS1 is highly self critical and if he feels he can't do something he will do his best to avoid doing it. He didn't paint a picture for the whole of reception because on the second day his felt his self-portrait looked nothing like him. I and his teacher have taken a more hands off approach because it is more important that he actually does the writing than gets it perfect everytime.

In answer to the OP having been a mature student in a class of 16 year olds, something definately needs to be done about plagerism. Nearly all of them copied humungous chunks from books and websites, changing the odd word and failed to understand why they were marked down.

In an ideal world LeQueen, however for whatever reasons a lot of children have real difficulties spelling when they reach secondary school and trying to correct it all at once is definitely overwhelming and disheartening for them.

It's obviously a different situation in primary education when children are first learning to spell, as you say their vocabulary is rather limited, but I still don't think it's worth pointing out too many spelling errors for each piece of work because children can only focus on so many things at once.

I also think that there isn't enough emphasis on spelling or plagiarism in education at the moment!

Op - I had same problem with DD (9) last week.

She needed just 3 facts on a history topic. She googled it herself, picked a website with simple English (so far so good), and then picked 3 of the facts written in the more simple English, but still not in English she would use.
I tried to get her to write the facts in her own words, but she threw a hissy fit. The teacher NEVER said they needed to do that... There was no convincing her that it was not right to just copy the facts down.

She just received a large red tick to acknowlege the homework.