To wish teachers had to take a spelling proficiency test before qualifying?

[ChwatFeechers]

DD, 11, is in her final year of primary school.

Yesterday she brought her books home from year 5. I was gobsmacked at the number of spelling mistakes which had been missed, whilst others had been marked in green pen. It wasn't an oversight either, as the same mistake was made often without being corrected, for example Febury for February.
There were also some grammar corrections to things DD had written correctly.
This isn't the first time I've noticed mistakes either.
AIBU to wish teachers had to prove they can spell adequately?
[runs]

Your comment was goadier, Jeanne!

I think I made unpax up but it does have an Angela Brazil ring to it.

Real pax now as I have to go out.

TheHumourlessHarpy Yes, teachers are given a spelling test (if you had researched, you would know)

Yes, I'm aware there will be some kind of spelling test. I didn't need to research that fact, seems pretty obvious!

Perhaps you need to look up the definition of 'proficient'?

To the OP, one of the issues with not correcting properly is that some children miss out. If you are the type who will benefit from seeing the same wrong spelling marked in red several times, you lose that benefit.

I'm also still puzzled about the regional aspect of "somethink"

Anyone who has worked with young people in the last twenty years will say that literacy has declined. The worst of it is, teachers are put under a lot of pressure to do other things so they don't have enough time to correct things fully.

Another point that puzzles me is that there is so much complaining about equality from the same groups who put state school children at a disadvantage with measures like this. I will happily be corrected but at present I don't know of any private schools who would mark the work of a child going into secondary with a maximum of three mistakes? It's not just about money with private schools, it's the fact that state schools are like a huge government experiment on the children and they are the ones who suffer.

But maybe OP will say her child is at private school?

The thread title does relate, TheHumourlessHarpy.

No, butterfly, it's just a normal state school.

Anyone who has worked with young people in the last twenty years will say that literacy has declined.

No, they really wouldn't.

OP, clearly you've got yourself in a knot, and you didn't realize teachers were tested the way harpy and others have explained they are. C'mon: you're making yourself look silly by pretending you didn't mean what you said in your OP.

Beaufort hits the nail on the head. Not correcting spelling and grammar really disadvantages children in later life. We can all read the post from HumourlessHarpy but an employer will infer that the writer is sloppy and careless (and possibly academically challenged). That is not going to help in gaining employment.

Surely if you correct all the mistakes, so that the children get a better grasp of the language, the volume of errors will go down after time. Obviously done in supportive way so that the children don't get discouraged. Or am I missing something?

Alconleigh sorry to undermine your post at 9.04 but literally means figuratively as well now!

Oh dear, TheHumourlessHarpy. Calm down.

OP, clearly you've got yourself in a knot, and you didn't realize teachers were tested the way harpy and others have explained they are. C'mon: you're making yourself look silly by pretending you didn't mean what you said in your OP.

I genuinely have no idea what you're referring to.

Your thread title and your OP.

You can still see it, right?

God, this thread's depressing. There's no wonder people are so atrocious at spelling nowadays if teachers are too scared to mark their work properly in case they upset the children or "it uses up too much ink" to mark them all!
Good grief.

Tess with that exhibition of a complete lack of understanding of what the job of teaching involves, I can only hope you do not work with children or young people.

Utter ignorance. You've embarrassed yourself.

But if it's wrong, it's wrong and should be corrected! How are children supposed to know that they have made the error otherwise? That policy is madness. Good grief! Are children really so delicate nowadays that they can't accept more than 3 corrections?

If you get a piece of work back with every third word highlighted it is totally demoralising, particularly if you have used the same (wrong) spelling consistently, if you have written 'dogg' instead of 'dog' 10 times do you really need it highlighting 10 times or just once?

butterfly you are wrong about private schools. We mark using pretty much the same scheme as state schools.

The point, fr me, is that IF we believe that correct spelling is the most important aspect of a child's writing, then it is possible to allocate teachers' marking time to correcting the spelling.

If we believe that other aspects of writing are also - or are at times more - important, then we have to recognise that some spellings may remain uncorrected.

In my class spelling lessons, all wrong spellings are marked and corrected. In some other lessons, where a specific success criterion is spelling, I will mark all wrong spellings. In other lessons, focusing on other aspects of writing, I will prioritise marking those aspects, and only correct some spellings.

Wen children routinely write 2-3 pages per lesson, as is common in upper primary, and I have at least 60 books to mark, then I do have to prioritise in some way. Of course, if it is decided that spelling is the priority, I will allocate as much of my marking time as I can marking it. It just reduces the amount of time I can spend commenting on other aspects.

People aren't 'so atrocious at spelling nowadays', though.

This is a very popular claim, but if you think about it, huge numbers more of us are literate than even a few generations ago. Even in my parents' generation, there were many children who were simply not considered worth educating in that way, who today would be taught to read and write. I think it's amazing how much progress has been made.

My dad really struggles to understand this. He believes that spelling and grammar were much better when he was a child. But, he forgets that his classes excluded children with special needs who would now be included. He forgets that, when he was a child, many people doing blue collar work weren't required to communicate in writing to the extent they are now, and so lack of literacy was much less obvious. And he forgets that we communicate in writing as part of social life so much more than we did even a decade ago, so we regularly see poor spelling on FB or on MN or twitter, instead of chatting to people on the phone or meeting up in person.

This thread has been a real eye opener
Such a shame that the meaning of " literally" has been changed after the brilliant work shown here
theoatmeal.com/comics/literally

This isn't the first time I've noticed mistakes either.

This was in my OP. Note how I don't write ''This isn't the first time I've noticed spelling mistakes not being highlighted''.

I haven't drip-fed or lied. Sorry to disappoint you.

butterfly - it hasn't been 'changed' exactly - it's just the OED is descriptive, so reflects what people were doing all along. People cite it as if it's prescriptive, which it isn't.

No point in correcting every wrong word.
Correct say 3 and the child can focus on those words for next time, hopefully getting them right, and then they can look at 3 more.

If you went for your appraisal at work and they listed 100 things you could do better, that would do no good would it?

Tess,

I teach children all aspects of writing, not just spelling. I mark all aspects of writing, not just spelling. I am not worried about upsetting the children, but those who are not teachers may never have thought about just how many skills a child is juggling when they are writing:

• Fine motor skills (handwriting)
• Composition at a whole text level
• Genre
• Spelling
• Sentence structure
• Punctuation
• Grammar
• Word selection

Under each of these there could be another set of bullet points within that heading. While a child is learning to write, they may not yet be able to juggle ALL of those all at once, and it makes educational sense to focus on a smaller number in each piece of writing or each lesson.

Equally, when I mark, I want to mark against what was taught, what the focus was, for that lesson - I want to say 'yay, your paragraphing [which has previously been random] is perfect today, because you were really listening and did exactly what you were asked to do'. It would feel most unfair if I ignored this and instead showed, through my marking, that while I was PRETENDING in the lesson to care about paragraphing, what I ACTUALLY cared about was spelling.....

Downgraded, that's depressing.

Hezaire, exactly.

Especially if your appraisal target was one thing, which you did, and instead of being praised for doing it, you were told 100 things that you could do better...