to want my child's teacher to understand how apostrophes work!!!

[intothenever]

DD is writing things like 'She live's in a house' and has been taught that the plural of potato is potato's! I am getting really pissed off!

intothenever

Imagine you do a piece of work for your boss. You're very proud of it as you're just learning about this area. Your boss then goes through it and says - well you shouldn't use an apostrophe here, full stop there, that's misspelt, so' s that, and that....oh and you need a connective here. You're missing middle sound there etc etc. For every single mistake.

How would you feel?

Your boss then goes through it and says - well you shouldn't use an apostrophe here, full stop there, that's misspelt

A scenario that is less likely to arise if, of course, you can spell and punctuate. Don't want to be humiliated by your boss complaining about your writing? Learn to write. Books are available in bookshops.

If it was a good effort and was going out for publication I'd say "let's check for any typos" and give deserved, positive feedback about the actual meat of the work. This is exactly what I do on a regular basis, in fact.

What I wouldn't do is rip it to shreds for minor SPaG issues - which is what some people seem to want to happen to their children's work.

This is such a common mistake that children make, wider readers see apostrophes used for possession in books (near the letter 's') and generalise its use to plural words. Very unlikely that the teacher taught it ( haven't read the whole thread though).

When I mark work as a teacher, I rarely correct every single error in red pen, unless it is a very able child who has made very few mistakes. Just because it can be very disheartening for a child who has made a real effort to get their book back scribbled with red pen everywhere, seeming as if they have got more 'wrong' than 'right' and they are more likely to take on board marking feedback and corrections if they are a fair rather than excessive amount. Just MHO.

I had to endure four nativity productions last week whilst on the blackboard was written "Today's music: Somerset Raphsody". If I could have elbowed my way to it, I would have rubbed it off. Perhaps wrongly, I just fumed in silence.

Just because it can be very disheartening for a child who has made a real effort to get their book back scribbled with red pen everywhere

But if by secondary school children are still writing with extensive SPaG problems, wouldn't it be a good idea for school leadership to take a step back and consider what might be done about it? Accepting, arguendo, that it's demoralising to correct it all, is leaving it all uncorrected helping the child in the long-term? Perhaps a school might consider, I don't know, holding some classes which they might call, perhaps, "English classes" in which they teach people to write correctly? Rather than whining that either the children's primary teachers or the teacher's own primary teachers didn't do it right, secondaries could do it themselves. I know, crazy mad stuff.

Why on earth would anyone imagine that spelling and grammar are the barometer of education. One can be highly educated, able to think critically, analyse complex ideas, possess an enormous amount of specialised knowledge, know how to find out information and evaluate it, communicate their ideas in various ways and still struggle to spell 'definitely' or be a bit confused about semi-colons. I know brilliant university professors who can't spell for shit; it doesn't make them poorly educated.

It is usually people who can't do several of the above e.g. that fool gove who get all het up about spelling and grammar and see it as the be all and end all.

friday16

I was thinking more of a situation that work you were really proud of was criticised by someone else - yet you hadn't been taught it and were in the early stages.

Say you were learning to paint and your first efforts were "corrected".

Say you were learning to paint and your first efforts were "corrected".

You mean, someone who knows what they're doing comes in and tells me how to do it better? That sounds good.

I'm also not sure what the scare quotes around "corrected" are for. Someone pointing out that "there dog eight from it's bowel" is wrong isn't "correcting" in, they're correcting it. It's wrong.

There's a typo in that. Which you're welcome to point out. I suspect my self-esteem will survive it.

Friday16 - you are coming at it from a position of strength, where you are highly articulate and, no doubt, your daughter will be too. However, the reality is that many children will struggle. For example, in my mixed ability S1 class, some children are working on being able to write sentences, others are improving their use of the comma, others are writing like seasoned journalists. Each of them has their own target and area to work on. All of them have something to improve on. However, what I don't do is go through the work of a very, very dyslexic child who has just arrived from another school (Primary / Another Secondary) and put red pen over every single error. I can do that with some - because they only make a few errors and can cope with pen in a few places. For others, I will "target mark" those things that they are working on at the moment.

If you were learning to paint and your efforts were corrected - good. If your efforts were totally trashed with every single tiny error being held up to ridicule (and many children have very low self-esteem so can't cope with overt criticism) then you might think twice about becoming an Artist. There is no choice with literacy - we need it to access the world. Schools do run catch up classes. We do help the most insecure and those with areas of weakness. No sure who we can blame in Secondary schools. If they have just arrived we do the best we can with what we are given.

Also, the poster above talking about poor writing at University level is correct. However, since "my day" Universities have massively expanded, taking a far greater proportion of the population, hence a greater spread of abilities in all areas.

I hope for your daugher's sake, Friday16, she is not constantly cricitised at school for every tiny mistake in every subject as even good self-esteem can easily be damaged. We should correct only to improve, not to feel smug or make children feel bad about themselves.

Oh and back to the OP. You should definitely highlight this to the HT as it is making a difference to your child. Criticism should be used to make a difference - to bring about change. In this case, it should make a difference to your child and to other children. It is not just you being superior!

Sorry, not a sockpuppet but had name changed for Christmas - and then back again - the new name just took too long to type!

What I wouldn't do is rip it to shreds for minor SPaG issues - which is what some people seem to want to happen to their children's work.

I never said that. As you've already said there are ways of drawing attention to areas in need of improvement without belittling the overall effort. What's wrong with saying "marvellous story, you've done really well. Now if you just correct that and that, it will be perfect and we can put it on the wall"?

We should correct only to improve, not to feel smug or make children feel bad about themselves

Am I missing the bit where somebody suggested we should correct in order to feel smug? What a bizarre idea.

I tried that test. It was horribly confusing in its layout.

I got 10/10 for my spellings though.

The letter you're supposed to correct in practice paper 3 is abysmal. Not because the punctuation is a bit dodgy, but because it's crap. The lack of overall narrative and linkage between the paragraphs is awful. The paragraph beginning 'fortunately' is particularly bad, but apparently all that's wrong is the missing apostrophe, not that it should be re-written from scratch.

I believe that some of the people who want to point out errors in writing do so to reinforce their own sense of how good they are and how weak others are, rather than to bring about change. Thus, posters are criticising teachers for not picking up pupils on every single error.

where you are highly articulate and, no doubt, your daughter will be too.

The problem with debates about grammar, spelling and (implicitly) register is that most of the actors are made of the purest and driest straw. On the one hand we have "correct nothing for it will impede their creativity" hippies from Melanie Phillips columns (who don't exist) and on the other we have Gradgrindian "beat them until they don't split infinitives" from Michael Rosen columns (who also don't exist). It's worth noting that both Mad Mel and, er, Mild Mike write like angels, and therein lies the problem.

Articulate (by implication, articulate in standard English) parents have children who are in general skilled in the use of standard English because it's the working language of the household. When in the 1970s and 1980s it became fashionable for some schools to pretend that there was no such thing as standard English, and that you could speak and write nothing but Lancashire dialect without any economic impact on your life (again, obviously, I have some straw available to build this caricature), the middle classes were perfectly safe: their children spoke and wrote standard English anyway.

The risk is that people who have access to standard English, and whose children have access to standard English, deny knowledge of that register to the children they teach. And those children arrive at interviews unaware of the fact that the language they write and speak is condemning them to being ignored. You can argue that that shouldn't be the case, and that universities and employers should interview people who speak heavy dialect, deep patois or simply ungrammatical English with no prejudice at all, but they will. And for people who have access to that standard register to deny knowledge of it to people whose parents don't have access to it strikes me as entrenching disadvantage.

So it's a fine line between building self-esteem and trying to reduce intergenerational disadvantage. Ironically, children whose parents don't speak English (either at all, or very well) and fall into the category of EAL/ESL/EFL get better support, because they're assumed to need language instruction, while there's a tentativeness about the same instruction for native speakers. It's complex, and caricatures like correction being about "feel(ing) smug or mak(ing) children feel bad about themselves" don't help.

I believe that some of the people who want to point out errors in writing do so to reinforce their own sense of how good they are and how weak others are, rather than to bring about change. Thus, posters are criticising teachers for not picking up pupils on every single error.

My cross-post mentioned arguments built of straw. Rightly, it would appear.

I am being a bit stupid today (knackered - end of term) but I don't really see that we are arguing about anything. I agree, pupils need literacy skills. Believe me, I spend most of my days correcting errors far more horrendous than the odd extra apostrophe, and my youngest pupils are 11. I have children who can't write sentences. I have pupils who can't read at all, or do so at such a low level that they can't really access the books suitable for their age. They need these skills: they need them to get jobs; they need them to do the simplest of tasks like choosing what to watch on television.

However, I read above various posters who were asking that everything be marked: Op said, " And if infants spend their entire time worrying about SPAG they would never write anything.. I'm sorry but that is crap." and others agreed.

There is a particularly smug type of poster (and they exist in real life too) who wants to see children "told" if they make mistakes. English is a battleground that is fought over, as aptly summarised by Friday above. I was responding to those posters (including the OP) who were demanding that teachers correct every mistake and who don't have the first idea about the children we teach - only their own.

Also, often the children who come from overseas are the most motivated to get it "right" and who want Standard English as they see this as the way to get jobs and make progress. Often the hardest nuts to crack are those who come from families with low levels of literacy but where they are native speakers. The whole thing is further complicated by dyslexia, adhd and any number of other issues that prevent pupils from accessing the curriculum and can make literacy more challenging. Often these are found in families and, thus, children come from families with poor performance and low expectations. In these cases, the only motivator is the teacher and we only see them for about 3 hours a week!

Surely nobody is saying "don't correct at all", but rather "correct in moderation and with a clear target in mind so that the whole work is not smothered under red ink".

If the teacher had corrected every single error in ds' work in the early years he would not have been able to see his own writing underneath, which would have made it difficult for him to take the criticism on board.

Instead, she concentrated on one or two targets at the time, systematically and thoughtfully; then, when he had mastered those, moved on to the next. With the result that gradually and over a period of many months his writing improved.

Correct the teachers spelling, in an even BIGGER red pen!

We had a literacy session as part of a staff meeting recently, as we're evaluating our whole-school literacy marking policy. Our SENCO had done a focus group with students from across the school and one of the most interesting things they said was that they hate it when teachers write all over their work. It makes it difficult for them to see the wood for the trees, and would prefer it if we wrote on post-it notes and stuck them on. Unfortunately, this isn't really practical - post-its can fall off, and some depts. would end up spending half their budget on them. It was useful for us, as teachers, to know, though, that students don't like it when we scrawl all over their essays.