To expect my DCs' teachers to send out school reports correctly punctuated?

[Peppin]

Was looking at last term's school reports this morning. They included the following statements:

"Its good to see X progressing so well"

"theres a good reason for..."

and a few other howlers.

I have also noticed when looking through the DCs' school workbooks at parents' evenings that various spelling mistakes/grammatical errors they have made have gone uncorrected.

AIBU to expect teachers to (a) know how to use apostrophes and (b) take sufficient pride in their own professional image to ensure they check the spelling and punctuation in school reports before they are sent out?

It's not that pupils aren't corrected at all. Assessment is more effective when it is chunked into steps.

Orangesandlemons I agree. I think that the examples above are typos not necessarily an indicator of the teachers ability. I'd just dispute that teachers don't have time to write proper reports. It's part of the job.

Argh!! Bloody missing apostrophe but I will blame the iPhone I've switched to!!

This:

"It concerns me that pupils aren't correct for fear of demoralising them. This does go some way to explaining, however, why the university graduates who work for me submit reports (to go out to clients) which contain an incredibly high number of spelling/grammar mistakes and then are incensed/inconsolable/sulk when they see how many corrections I have made to their work"

is right. Very well said!

The little diddums have to deal with the fact that they are learning skills for life and that sometimes (often) mistakes have to be corrected so that they, er, LEARN. The number of spelling mistakes in the work done by people reporting to me in the past - people with 2:1 degrees - was appalling.

But hey, at least they felt good about themselves until they learnt that NO, you can't send stuff to clients with mistakes in.

At work we have a target for each pupil in literacy, if their target is capital letters then we mark their work accordingly and will highlight where they have missed a capital letter. We're not going to bother marking a missing apostrophe; if they are 9 and not remembering capital letters due to SEN then they aren't going to use apostrophes appropriately/if at all. Other pupils will have punctuation as their target and then will find missing apostrophes highlighted (as well as capital letters!)

I suppose I should proof read this email now :) I would hate my carefully thought out word's to have incorrect punctuation......

Gnocchi I've seen that loads of times before and it makes me laugh out loud every time!

The really only foolproof way to get NT kids to be good spellers (+ this means, being able to guess out a word by recognising patterns and getting it 100% right) is to get them reading, uninterrupted. It's so obvious and we all know it. There's no point in spelling apps and games. Why mess with what's perfect already? And reading longer, more complicated books, about history, not books geared to what grown ups think they might like, which hardly challenges them. Special teen fiction.

People saying stuff like "you can't expect them to be perfect"- it's hardly a height of perfection you can't quite dare to reach

Again it's not some woolly concept and it's not that they all get applauded for writing any old crap! The word I used 'demoralising' keeps coming up. I used it in relation to five year olds! I think there are some reading skills going amiss as no one has said that they are not corrected either. The corrections are targeted to give the child the next step to achieve based on their ability. If a child needs to learn to spell the word 'the' then that's the target. I'd they need to work on subordinate clauses then that would be their target.

We had spelling tests every school morning and maths tests, too. They were marked with red pen and our reading was tested constantly.

Somehow I have managed to emerge unscathed. Wibble. Twitch.

I am surprised how many get through with errors tbh. In all the schools I've worked in reports go through a range of checks - by the teacher writing (often hard to spot your own mistakes, esp if writing lots - you get blind to even obvious errors after a while), my the line manager and then my a head of year/head teacher - who checks them and will add their own comment.

Oh - with regards to correcting of children's work - it depends on what work it is, what the focus was that lesson, and the stage the child is at too. It can be too demoralising to mark down every spelling/punctuation error for some children - it could be every other word. It would do more harm than good.

So what happens in that situation, Hulababy? Do you just let dreadful spelling go because it would upset the child? Surely not? Please don't tell me that no remedial procedures are put in place?

If every word I'd spelt at school in an exercise was wrong, I'd know about it.

How did the less able kids do in those tests lapis? Some children will learn bad teaching, constant testing or not.

And spelling tests do NOT teach children to spell.
Many children can learn spellings and get 10/10 in every spelling test they ever do, but can they they apply the spellings in their independent writing later? Generally, no - 10/10 in a spelling test does not mean 10/10 in independent writing later.

It's such a long time ago I can't remember clearly about the other kids but of course some did better than others and were expected to correct their mistakes and again, as far as I remember, hand in their spelling test sheets with proper spelling.

We were lucky to have had some great teachers and I certainly had fab teachers (apart from Miss Bailey - History - oh dear) when I was at secondary school.

The thing is- if all kids read more, and voraciously, you'd hardly need to spend that much time on the basic grammar. They'd just pick it up. Then you could deepen the English curriculum and have a much better/interesting time of it- the teacher and the kids.

No I agree, spelling tests only, well, TEST the learning that going on the rest of the time.

In most classes the child would be targeted in the most important step forward. If they were struggling with words with 'igh' then they'd have targeted support to hit it. A bit pointless discussing iambic pentameter if they can't string a sentence together.

LapisBlue - if it is phonetically correct and not a high frequency word from that child's phase of learning - then yes, we wouldn't necessarily correct it. If it is a phoneme/grapheme they should know or a HFW they should know then it would be corrected.

As I said - it depends on the stage of learning they are at and the focus on that piece of work.

e.g

igh no wot th boi can doo - from a phase 3 child

We'd correct igh to I, th to the and change boi to boy (althoigh last one isn't actually in their phase, but it is a common enough word to warrant correcting at that stage)

I'd make sure they had capital letter, full stop and finger spaces.

The rest would depend on what work they were doing, the individual child, etc.

I would not correct every single word.

We normally do 2 stars and a wish - so find 2 positives, and one target for next time.

BUT I work with Y1, so they are only 5/6 years old.

YANBU.
at such silliness on the report card.

I don't agree. I can read James Joyce but I couldn't write Ulysses because I absorbed it. Some things need explicit teaching like early reading skills.

I do agree that we need to embed a love of reading and then interest in language develops further. Children should read and write as widely as possible but covering their books in red pen and telling them to correct their own work is not the best way to do it.

We also need to set very high expectations and be good language role models ourselves. Which in the OP's case I would mention the errors. Any teacher worth their salt would be mortified and hopefully it wouldnt happen again.

Wouldn't!!

Even in Y1 we ask children to check their own work - they call it "uplevelling" at our school. To what extent they do this depends on the child's stage of learning. My little group - they'd be looking for finger spaces, full stops and a capital letter at the start of a sentence. Next group up might be checking different sounds in their work or use of other punctuation, such as ?, !, etc. We have checklists out.

Doing the rounds on Facebook..... when confronted by the grammar police I always smile and say softly "there, they're, their....." :o

Hulababy we do self- and peer assessment which serves a similar function. It starts in the nursery where they assess their sitting and listening skills and then moves onto their own work when in reception.

a colleague has over three hundred to write in the next fortnight. anyone who has one to read and picks holes needs to get a job, never mind a life.

The answer to the OP's question - if you're a teacher or not, should surely be YANBU?

To expect a correctly punctuated report, from a teacher, could that ever be an unreasonable expectation?

If it is too much to expect, by that rationale, would it be OK if - for example -hospitals regularly allowed hygeine levels to drop so badly that as a result terrible infections were rife around patients and staff? After all, doctors and nurses work horrendously long hours and are stretched, you know?

Of course it's not acceptable, but it happens. Don't say it's OK though, it's not.