to be fed up with correcting teacher's spelling mistakes

[dealer]

No doubt I will now write a post riddled with spelling mistakes, but I'm not teaching small children in my defence.

I accept, no-one can spell everything, and I would not be surprised if a teacher had to look up stationary/stationery for instance. But I'm really fed up with ones that I would expect children to be able to spell turning up in homework/letters/displays. And I feel compelled to correct them.

Recently we've had Antartica, in huge coloured letters on a display. Got me a very grumpy response since he then felt he had to change it. We've had a work sheet home with Autum on. My son asked for barbecue/barbeque in his spelling book (not sure how to spell it myself) but I think the teacher writing bar-b-q is a bit out of order. And the latest one is the teacher correcting squirl to skwirel on homework. I wrote on it in red 'teacher please correct correctly', possibly a bit snotty of me but I'm getting fed up of it.

Do other people get this? And do they get annoyed? Or AIBU?

People who cite examples from the past, when people left school at 13 and 14 able to write and spell correctly, forget that the curriculum was so much narrower than and being literate and numerate and having good general knowledge were highly prized.

Surely being literate and numerate should still be prized. I wonder if all this grooviness and casualness is practised only in state schools.

When children learn foreign languages are they allowed to do 'freestyle' spelling or is English the only language they are allowed to disrespect?

Jeez, I've complained to Customer Services departments before now on poor grammar... I'd go stratospheric if the spelling my DC was/ my DCs were (see?) supposed to learn was incorrect!
I'd raise it with the HT and ask what they feel the best way forward would be, as this is obviously a concern you'd like to tackle early.. and follow up if there's no sign of improvement!

being literate and numerate and having good general knowledge were highly prized

Erm, yes, that is why we mentioned it.
Why were these things prized then but not now?
When I was at school (70s-80s) literacy, numeracy and general knowledge were still valued highly - so why has it all gone tits up in such a relatively short period of time?
Surely if you are correct about there being a broader curriculum now then general knowledge would increase, not diminish?
My niece doesn't know who Mussolini is. How the hell do you get to be a 21 year old graduate and not know who Mussolini is?

Why don't teachers now correct all spelling/grammar errors?
How are kids expected to learn anything if there is no consistency?

Look back at the posts about literacy across the curriculum.

Once you're past primary, the subject specialists outside English can't be arsed doing what is very hard work.

I speak as I find.

When I taught Mainstream (admittedly not for long) it took all my time to teach the music curriculum. I was supporting kids doing GCSE level who were working at NC1/2 in terms of their literacy. There is no way on this earth that I could have brought them up to scratch without significant, daily, concentrated input - and that's if I could have got past the delightful attitudes they had ended up with, largely as a defence mechanism against ridicule.

I was also teaching children from refugee families, unaccompanied minors - one child who had been a soldier in the Congo.

Children cannot learn if they are struggling with lives that most adults would find impossible.

I'm not suggesting all children have terrible home lives, but just pointing out one reason for spelling and grammar being at the very bottom of the priority list for many kids!

Also, I'm 34. I didn't learn how to spell and use grammar in school. I taught myself because I was interested. My 27 year old sister, very intelligent - but utterly unable to spell, construct a letter, write a CV - any number of skills that require a level of literacy that many people just don't have.

As a pedant, I find it appalling that people don't care, but I don't know how to change that. Demanding that they do doesn't help. I bet half of the teachers that have been corrected by parents are not even embarrassed by their ineptitude.

(I would personally introduce Latin at primary level, but I'm odd. )

I was watching the news about the strike this morning. There were the teachers making their placards (and frankly a 5 year old could do better colouring in), and there were the immortal words:-

Hand's off our pensions

How do you know they were teachers? Could have been nurses. Or any other public sector workers.

At the school I work at we have a teacher of DT who is extremely dyslexic. It is always a good laugh with teachers and students when trying to read any of his instructions, emails, etc . Fortunately he has very good verbal skills. At parents' evening he always apologises to parents for his poor spelling skills. He is a very good DT teacher, and particularly gets on well with students with lower abilities.

They were interviewing people from the NUT at the time, plus a couple of random 'young teachers' so I think I was safe in assuming they were teachers. But yes, you are right they might not have been.

Plus the cameraman did seem to zoom in on the mis-spelt poster .

You see, I'm torn on this. As someone who really struggles with ignoring mis-spellings (DH says I'm a bundle of laughs in the pub, when I always scrutinise the "specials" board for the inevitable misplaced apostrophe), I agree with all those who say a teacher must be able to spell and have good grammar. I have little patience with most colleagues who make basic mistakes. (In fact I'm still furious after all these years with the former colleague who leant over my handwritten poster and, unasked, inserted an apostrophe to "ours!" I couldn't even Tippex it out as it was on a coloured background! Had to start all over again).
But then I look at my lovely (possibly dyslexic) NQT colleague, who works all hours to produce exciting and motivating activities for the children, who adore her as she's funny, kind, firm and inspiring. Who's to say she is less deserving of her job than a dull and uninspiring teacher who happens to be good at spelling?

That's a really good point LeQueen and something I've encountered quite often, with customer service people and others. Native speakers often not only cannot write clearly (to the extent that they cannot be understood, this isn't about pedantry), they don't think it is important (nor apparently do the companies who hire them as public-facing representatives). They also use colloquialisms in written English, apparently without thought or awareness, which makes them very difficult to understand to non-native speakers, or even non-locals. A whole other topic there but, how do they get through school without being prompted to think about whether others will be able to understand them?

clam, I've said it already, your colleague needs to recognise her problem and adopt better coping stategies, then maybe she'll be a great teacher. I think you've already suggested that you're more uncomfortable about approaching her than about covering up for her. Perhaps ask someone else to do it?

LeQ - I am an old fart and was taught in the old ways but that's not important. What I remember is that my mother and her sisters didn't get schooled beyond age 15 and they went on to do jobs in shops and cafes, yet they wrote letters to each other which I still have which are well written, spelt properly, punctuated well and are also interesting. I don't know what I'm trying to say here really but just thought that I'd throw it in.

I had a friend who taught English at a minor public school - late 80s perhaps, 'new' exams (or newish, would that be GCSEs?). He was told that they were to ignore spelling errors and basic grammatical mistakes as long as the sense was there.

I remember looking at a pile of essays and being utterly shocked at some the spelling and grammar. It's why my friend didn't pursue his teaching career any further, couldn't stand the stupidity of the rules handed down by Government.

Yes, I was one the early guinea-pigs for GCSEs in the late 80s. We'd been taught spelling and grammar at primary school, then language teaching fizzled out in secondary English, really before we got to the 'it's all about what you're trying to say' GCSEs. Then I took history A-level and was told at the start 'of course you will be marked on impression, so if you have poor spelling, punctuation or hand-writing the examiners will reduce your marks'. Thanks for that, inconsistent system! I don't blame the teachers, they were doing what the Govt told them. Luckily I'd picked up good writing skills quite easily, early and found this came naturally. Unlucky others...

Just so pleased that O-levels were still going when I was 16, though CSEs had just come in too. My parents were very highly educated and intelligent so to a great extent it wouldn't have mattered what system we'd been educated in, the parents would have made sure that all the basics were up to scratch.

Just goes to show, one can't always blame teachers and divorce oneself from all responsibility. I'm not suggesting anyone on this thread is, mind, but plenty do.

It kills me to have to mark undergraduate essays and wade through all the terrible English and poor spelling. They cannot structure their work, either. It takes the entire first year of the course to instil in them what they should have known by the age of 14. The advantage of doing this, however, is that they are shocked into working quite hard, and tend to get good jobs at the end of the course. One of my colleagues did research into this, talking to employers. One said,"ploughing through reports and correcting them is a subsidy to the employee this business cannot afford" and he was right. Students need to be embarrassed if they can't do these things and sort themselves out. Meanwhile schools need to be hard on poor spelling and grammar, especially amongst teachers.

My child's teacher(s) also need to be educated. They send him home arguing with me that "H" is pronounced "haitch" as opposed to "aitch". They put up signs in the class spelling words incorrectly, which again I struggle to convince my child about, "because teacher knows everything". A recent one was "penney" until I showed my child how it was written on a coin. My child actually pointed this out to the teacher but her reply was simply "Oh well".

They have a book that goes home with a teddy bear that the children then write about their weekend in, which is a sort of reward for being good at school, and actually quite a coveted prize amongst the young ones. On the cover is stuck a printed sheet that the teacher has typed up with something like "....please encourage your child to write about what they got up TOO at the weekend...."

They also seem to have trouble with differentiating between "your and you're" as well as "their, there and they're". We moved to be in the catchment area of this school because of the Ofsted reports it had received. What a total let down.

I'm reluctant to point any of this out as I don't want my children being victimised by the teachers. What we need is better testing of teachers and maybe anonymous ways of pointing out the bad ones. What hope have our little lovelies got????

If I didn't have my own in school I would probably not believe all the other posts on here, but being involved I totally believe all of them.