To think spelling and grammar can't be ignored

[busyhouseof8]

DS2 is in Yr6. He came home from school with homework for a 30 minute piece of writing to describe a friend.

I gave the usual talk about being careful with your spelling and punctuation only for him to say, "it's OK, Mrs P says she doesn't mind about any of that so long as she can work out what we're trying to say".

AIBU to think that actually learning spelling and punctuation is reasonably important? DH is currently sifting through graduates to employ, many of whom have excellent degrees but can't seem to spell for toffee or string a literate sentence together. His firm runs remedial English classes just so they can write a letter to a client that makes sense and will be paid for!

Parents' evening this week - should I question her methods?

Apologies for all spelling and grammar errors in this post..............

"It is snobbery to insist on correctness for correctness' sake"

What a ridiculous statement. Of course schools should insist on "correctness". How else are tests going to be graded?

scholes - thanks, that is interesting to know about German.

I do see what you're saying. I'm evangelical about this. It's just I can still confuse 'there' and 'their' if I'm writing at speed, and I am so grateful to all the teachers who kept telling me not to worry, and showing me how to find ways to check for errors rather than learn rules, and so on. And I'm still grateful to my lovely supervisors now, who politely ignore my errors and don't assume it's carelessness. I do vividly remember how nice it felt at school when - very occasionally - a teacher would accept my work wasn't well-spelt but would concentrate on what I was trying to say. Year 6 might be a good time for a bit of that?

Cote - oddly enough, tests are already graded on a tiny bit more than spelling and grammar!

They work very hard at learning it , doing years and years of dictation tests, spelling tests, as well as all the grammar work they do. German is more phonetic than English of course but it doesn't just come to them with no effort. Learning to spell and use their grammar correctly takes up a lot of time in German schools. If it is easy, I don't think the schoolchildren see it that way!

I am not sure this is the kind of education I like best but as far as obtaining real confidence in correct written usage of your mother tongue, it seems to be quite effective. Although I have read before on MN, that French schools for instance do very little creative writing, there are still a lot of adult French writers who do write creatively and well. Maybe we are streets ahead of other Europeans in this , I really don't know. I would personally rather write a creative story than do a dictation though.

ZZen - Oh, sure, I didn't mean to suggest they didn't work at it. I was just pondering a bit!

I suspect it's the same as so many things - different children like different teaching styles, no matter what language they speak.

To be creative it's important not to be worrying about SPAG for first drafts - maybe that's what she meant?

Ideally you want to be able to switch off your thinking brain and just go for it. You can deal with SPAG later on when you come to edit it.

Although I agree that it's important to know, it's also important not to care when you're aiming for creativity.

I think tbh all children would prefer to write a story than do a dictation. It is fascinating. I don't have any answers but how dc learn and how schools approach teaching interests me a lot.

Me too.

I think it is fascinating. I have to say, my older brother really, violently hated being told 'write a story'. He scrabbled around and would write about two lines - it was almost physically painful to him, and I don't just mean writing, I mean sitting there feeling hopeless! He is the least 'Arts-y' person I know, though - a Mathematician through and through.

YANBU. They should learn to write correctly. Correct spelling & grammar should be expected at school, especially in an English class.

my pet hate- your instead of you're. It's rife on facebook.

"the teacher is not going to act on any suggestions/instructions in these essays."

The teacher won't be building the swimming pool that the student has worked out the volume of in a maths test either, but the student won't get full marks for a sloppy answer. :) One point of language teaching, even when it's the native language, is to pass on the rules. The structure from which the language hangs is as important as the words themselves. The fact that English is more complex than other languages simply makes it more challenging and arguably more rewarding when the rules are understood. Yes, we can probably 'get by' with something less than perfect and still make ourselves understood. But there is a beauty to correctly written English that we can all recognise when we see it. Worth striving for.

EllaDee - You didn't get the point of my post, which was not only about writing.

If insisting on correctness is snobbery, how do you suggest teachers correct math tests? Biology exams?

Or are you trying to say that insisting on correctness in other subjects is not snobbery, but insisting on correct spelling and grammar is?

I am not sure Maths and English demand the same kind of 'accuracy', though. I mean, you couldn't mark a story with absolute objectivity, even in Primary School. But it is only (IMO) in the relatively high levels of Maths that personal style comes into it at all (whatever an 'elegant proof' is, as opposed to a 'clumsy proof' I am not sure, but I have been told such things exist! ).

I think there is a beauty to expressive, well-used English ... and a maybe also a beauty to correctly written English - but they don't have to be the same things!

Children lose their creativity when they are fussing over every word and full stop. Get it down on paper, let the creativity flow, enjoy writing your story - then proof read it, self correct your spelling & grammar - make it presentable for others to read - but in the first instance let the creativity flow. Who on earth could object to that?

Cote, I said 'correctness for correctness' sake', which means something very different from just 'correctness'.

Some questions have a right answer for a reason. Others are mere convention. We learn both kinds of answers at school, but some parts of grammar and spelling really are just convention. IMO, misuse of those should not be so heavily penalized as they are currently.

Most people, especially children, learn best through absorption/osmosis. Putting a child off reading and writing by insisting on perfect SPAG first time round is counter-productive.

The best spellers are the ones who read and write the most. They're the ones who learn when a word looks wrong, and who automatically know how to use grammar.

Yes, teach them the finer points of it, but there's no need IMO to ram it down their throats - far, far more important to get them loving reading and writing so that they do lots and lots of it.

Cote, English has a very complex orthography. It is very hard to learn to spell in English. I don't know how you'd assess how 'easy' a language is as a whole though.

Maybe you struggle with English because it is your third language, though? DH is trilingual too, and certainly his third language (which is a bit of an oddity anyway) is not so strong as the other two. I think it is fairly common.

I speak Latin, Greek, Middle English, Old English, a bit of French, Italian and a very little Russian, and honestly, I do know what I'm talking about with the orthography. You see, people research this stuff. French orthography is not transparent (as Italian pretty much is, for example), but it is generally considered much shallower than English.

I'm sure all sorts of other factors contribute to how 'easy' or 'hard' a language is in total.

Oh, sorry, you say it's French you struggle with ... ignore my point about English, then, but I think still it is not unusual to have uneven abilities within bilingualism or trilingualism.

I haven't read the entire thread so sorry if someone has already said this,

When I was at school, we used to write a piece of creative writing, then when we were happy with the story and the teacher had added any corrections, we would write it out on nice paper, with the guidlines lines underneath and correct the spelling and grammer at that point.

There was no inturuption to our creative thinking, our errors were corrected, and by writing the piece out again, we learnt the corrections

I take it they don't do that any more (DC1 due any day now so no experience of schools yet), or maybe this was peculiar to my school.

Could any teachers on here suggest why not? Not trying to start anything, genuinely curious.

I'm basically with EllaDee. I have similar views on instrumental music (where children are often unable to play creatively or expressively because they are told they must obsess about reading exactly from sheet music, even though that's a very specialised executory visual learning style that suits only a minority of them).

But a teacher friend pointed out to me that sometimes you have to "be on the inside" (ie know lots about spelling in this case) before you can have the luxury of saying spelling doesn't matter - if you can't spell, you risk being excluded and your good ideas being ignored by people who believe spelling is vital. It's a presentation issue, a bit like having your good ideas ignored because you haven't learned how to dress smartly and keep your hair presentable.

[Ella, I think the easiest languages to spell are the ones where each sound has only one set of letters representing it - Czech, for instance, is ridiculously easy to spell compared with English. Declining and conjugating isn't hard for native speakers most of the time - it's only hard if it departs from colloquial speech which is rare. There is no need to learn rules about stationery and stationary, etc in these languages - except where they appear in all the tricky imported foreign words!]

ah, ella, I see you know lots more than me about the other languages!