To not point this out to dd's teacher?

[LiegeAndLief]

Dd in reception. They have been learning about their bodies and a big poster has gone up on the wall about eyes. It says "Eye's have.... Eyelashes, eyebrows etc" and "Eye's can... Blink, cry etc".

I am a major apostrophe pedant and it makes me cringe every time I look at it. On the other hand, dd is just starting to read and has no idea what an apostrophe is, never mind how you should use it, and I think me mentioning it to the teacher might be very twattish.

The teacher is great and very experienced, ds was also in her class and I have never spotted a mistake like this before. They've had a couple of supply teachers recently so I'm hoping one of them did it and the teacher hates it as much as I do but doesn't want to go to the effort of changing the poster!

Please tell her as it is not acceptable. I would want to know and thank the person who pointed it out. Of course if she looks mystified and doesn't see an error, then that is far more worrying.
It was unlikely to have been done by a supply teacher as we just follow the plan and don't usually do displays.

Point it out in a lighthearted way. BTW, I am a supply teacher - it doesn't mean we are inferior to permanent members of staff!
I was in a class this week that had a "Stationary" tray. It took all my restraint not to tear it off.

Exactly Newt. This is on a display. There is no way it could have been a typo.

Could you just get a white sticker and - ninja-esque - cover it up next time you're in the classroom?

Celia, me too, I am shocked at what I see on my travels. I am becoming braver at politely pointing them out.
One of my regular schools has a dreadful spelling error on the homepage of their website. I pointed it out last year, it is still there.

I'm a teacher and I'd want to be told! It may have been done by someone else and she simply hasn't noticed- just tell her. I make mistakes all the time, and am always happy to have them pointed out! (I use it as a lesson into how none of us are perfect! I also use a dictionary in front of classes often if I'm unsure of a meaning or spelling.)

I can't believe that some people on this thread think it's ok for rogue apostrophes to be appearing - in a classroom, of all places!

I'm a teacher and I would want to be told.

Rogue apostrophes and poor spelling are endemic in certain classes at the dds' school (dd1, who will rule Pedants' Corner one day, often points out mistakes).

I was taken aback last week, however, to find that homework was to write five sentences and then 'uplevel' them. Apparently this involves adding adjectives, adverbs, exciting vocabulary etc. It would be nice if the dictionary definition mentioned this, but there is no dictionary definition, because it isn't a bloody word.

I give up.

LaQueen- I was observing a more senior member of staff do a guided reading lesson (supposed to be getting some tips). The aim of her lesson was adjectives. She insisted that "gobbled" was an adjective because it described how someone ate, and I didn't dare pull her up on it because I was new and less senior.

On another occasion I was in a classroom when a teacher was explaining comparatives and superlatives. She told the class that comparatives were when the word had an 'er' or 'est' ending (faster, fastest were comparatives) and superlatives were when you had to use 'more' and 'most' (more useful, most useful). Same teacher told her class that roots were the first part of the word- so the root of telephone was 'tele' and 'phone' a suffix. Again I didn't dare pull them up on it.

Now I'm an established member of staff though I do tell people. I find the best way is to approach them on their own/ speak quietly so noone else hears, and act a little confused ('oh, is that what a comparative is? I thought it was when you were comparing 2 things, so 'faster' and 'more useful' are both comparatives'). People don't like it when you straight out say that they are wrong, especially in front of others, but if you gently plant a seed of doubt they will think about it, maybe look it up or maybe you jog their memory so they realise you are right.

Wearing 'uplevelling' has been around in schools for years. It helps children to give 'improving their sentences' a name. However that is a stupid homework as it's encouraging them to write poor sentences first.

Gah the misuse of the apostrophe pisses me off no end, I wouldn't mind but its so damn simple - if it's more than one it doesn't need an apostrophe!

I am a teacher and usually I am on the 'don't pick out mistakes, teachers are busy and might overlook the odd thing'. But on this you should point it out, maybe go for a jokey approach as someone else said.

We wearing we say 'uplevelling' too - sorry about that!

Though, probably not nearly so disappointing and demotivating as leaving school with shit GCSEs, and spending your life in a dead-end job, as a result, yes hmm

This is me, I was not taught any grammer or anything, I was moved to a new school at 9 but it was too late, the basics were lost, forever.

I just remembered another one- we had a student maths teacher when I was at secondary school.

He wrote in my maths book 'you should of done ...'

I wrote back 'you should of written should have' !

LaQueen Since you can't actually spell simile perhaps you should leave it to the experts.....

English is not my first language and even I know that apostrophe is an eye soar! How can a teacher make such a mistake.

My ds has homework entitled My Times Table's Chart in big letters.

I am going to have to sit on my hands for a whole week

But you are right that there was a lack of grammar teaching for many years and that many teachers in infant and junior schools have poor grammar. Mine is not perfect so I check thoroughly and teach the students the rules that help me.

Not entirely true LaQueen

I am under 30, yet clearly remember being taught SPAG at school. At primary, we had grammar workbooks and worksheets, which started with the basics and got more complex as you went through them. In addition, I think we had a grammar lesson once a week where we would cover topics as a class.

In secondary, English lessons definitely covered most of the literary terms you referred to earlier. We learned spellings every week, based on errors we had made in previous lessons, and also worked through a system where we learned frequently misspelled words.

However, I think the vast majority of pupils, especially once we got to secondary school, thought that it just didn't matter, and didn't apply to them. So long as others understood what they were writing, they didn't care if the words were spelled right or not. Exams only awarded a few puny marks for accurate spelling and grammar, we weren't tested on it as a separate entity or penalised if our writing wasn't up to scratch so long as the content was understandable. And computers were just beginning to be commonplace, with their spell checkers, so what did they need to know if something was correct, the computer would tell them! (Reminds me of a poem, about a spell checker, something like "eye no this is spelled write, my spellcheck tolled me sew"). One of my friends would never handwrite a lower case 'd', she only ever wrote it as a capital- even in the middle of words! And it didn't matter, because it wasn't really a capital, because everyone knew that's how she wrote them .