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?

In fact, if he was on MN - he would be a regular in Pedant's corner. Which SHOULD have an apostrophe, as it is the corner belonging to the Pedants.

The two spelling mistakes that make me want to scream and tear my hair out are 'draw' for drawer, and 'appauling' for appaling. If I see them on a thread on here, I have to hide the thread for fear of going insane.

So shouldn't it be Pedants' Corner. Unless there is just one pedant.

isn't it "appalling"?

Oops! Missed a question mark.

"DownbytheRiverside Sun 27-Nov-11 09:24:21
'Ds questioned a 'square' in some homework in the 3rd week of this term. It was a rectangle (4x3cm) and did not look remotely like a square.'

A square is a rectangle, just a very specific type of rectangle. "

But it sounds like the teacher in this case was calling a (non-square) rectangle a square. Which is just completely wrong

'He also says that spelling mistakes and grammatical errors just 'jump out' at him from things like shop signs. He gets irrationally annoyed by rogue apostrophes. At 9yo.'

Such sadness, if he was a decade older it would be a perfect match.
We could be mothers-in law.

how many pedants can you fit in an empty corner?

One - after that it is no longer empty

A fellow teacher of mine had a large display up in the classroom. It said "Josephs Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat".

When we pointed out (others members of staff having a meeting in her classroom) that she had missed an apostrophe, her response was "haha you never know when to use them do you? Isn't it hard?". I really thought "no, actually I'm a primary school teacher so of course I know when to use an apostrophe. So should you."

She's a total numbnut and each year the parents dread getting her...

Yes, it IS appalling - stupid sticky keyboard doesn't like me typing double letters.

It's DS1 that gets annoyed by the apostrophes - and his grammar is, to be honest, better than mine!

And surely there isn't MORE than one Pedant?

Stealth .

An earlier post queried why spelling and grammar had gone downhill in recent times. I'm not sure it is a recent thing. I was at school in the 1970s and remember being told that it was the school's plan to have everyone writing neatly in the italic style with a fountain pen. This was a primary school, not secondary. They placed greater emphasis on neat handwriting than they did spelling and grammar and did not care what the children wrote so long as it looked neat. Fortunately my mother made sure I also learned how to spell, at home, because the teachers had no interest in teaching us. There was a very high level of illiteracy at that school, and children were leaving unable to read and write and had to be taught at the secondary school.

zipzap - I'm not sure of the origins of Milton Keynes, but I'm afraid I have to point out, as we're all being pedantic here, that your use of an apostrophe in "its" is incorrect. Possessive pronouns do not have apostrophes.

My daughters went through primary school without having their spelling mistakes corrected - when I asked the head why, he said that they didn't want to curb their creativity and that learning to spell would come naturally. I am a stickler for correct spelling, and (nicely) tried to show my children how to spell correctly.

One daughter progressed to university, and now has a very good degree in journalism (and I still cringed at the spelling errors in her work) - her ability to spell never ever materialised, and it still hasn't.

I really do not know where this miraculous ability to spell is supposed to come from if it is not taught from an early age.

OP, I can't stop laughing at "Skwirel". Really? It's not even close. Is she possibly marking in the evening after having a or two?

I would be really cross if my DCs came home with corrections like that. Surely someone who reads anything, ever, would have a slightly better approximation of the word "Squirrel"? At least putting a q in there somewhere would be a start.

It this "skwirel" teacher of yours striking on Wednesday OP?

Oops! Scrap my last "looking for the positives" post. I forgot about the 'k'

clam arghhhh. . I do know that. Honest. Unfortunately I was trying to type that last post on my phone as ds2(3) decided it was time to do a spot of mummy wrestling/wrangling/monstering so I ended up a little distracted. And stupid phone automatically 'auto corrects' its to it's every time regardless of whether or not it's needed - so about half the time it is auto-wrong rather than auto-correct.

Next time I will try to double check it hasn't auto-wronged me before I post! and I'll just try to check this post now extra carefully despite the dc monkeying around as sod's law will dictate there will be at least another 3 mistakes in it. and then will slink back to Pedants' Corner and hope that I'm still allowed in.

I am only halfway through my pregnancy and this thread is making me consider home-schooling our child! It shouldn't surprise me, as I teach English Lit at a university and some of our students go on to teacher training, and in the ten years I've been in the profession, the standard of literacy among them has dropped significantly.

I do diagnostic grammar tests (apostrophes, homophones like 'your/you're', 'their/there/they're' etc) with the first years, and I'm continually referring students to the academic writing centre for extra help with grammar etc, but the fact remains that I'm a third-level teacher who is supposed to be lecturing them on Romanticism and Victorian literature for an English degree, on the assumption that they were taught to read and write fluently during their schooldays before they started a degree course that presupposes literacy.

Of course the problem with that is that they are being taught themselves by schoolteachers who don't seem to have learned to write properly...

I'm a teacher and I'm fed up of correcting other teacher's spelling mistakes! I am often called a snob for thinking it matters.......

Kritur..I know. Some teachers give other teachers a bad name

In my view, one of the values of threads such as these threads is that it shows how easy it is to overlook a simple grammatical error or a silly typo.

Even when you are trying so hard to keep it skweaky clean as you know everyone ou there will be checking it for the slightest digression.

ha ha

This would drive me mad. If someone's in charge of educating children, surely it's not too much to expect them to be able to spell. I have no experience of this myself as DS is a few years off starting school. In the meantime I just have a little moan to myself about university graduates who can't distinguish between their, there and they're...

Same here, kritur.
And I've given up with correcting practice/practise. Isn't there anyone nowadays who knows the difference? Or should we capitulate to the Americans who just use the noun version?