To think that teachers should have a sound grasp of spelling and grammar?

[2kidsintow]

I know this is a forum, and that punctuation is used to a greater or lesser extent by various posters because of the more informal nature of the media and that auto-corect can be responsible for a lot of errors if you don't proof read. However, I'm surprised at posts I've read that have garmmatical errors in. The one that sticks in my head at the moment is the 'you and I' rule. A few teacher posters had put 'me and my colleague' or 'me and my boss' on a thread I've just been reading. Is it dialect in some areas to use this phrasing, or just incorrect?

Obviously students need to be able to read in order to answer questions in any subject. That doesn't mean that an A level maths teacher needs to be brilliant at spelling and grammar in order to be good maths teacher.

If they can't teach the relevant literacy for their subject, then they're not doing their job. For many this involves training as a good number of content-area teachers lack the confidence to address this.

I know a school where they wrote Governors as Governers on a fundraising brochure.

I have mentored several students (would be primary teachers) and it has surprised me how often spelling and grammar is an issue. "It is important to eat healthy to stay fit and well." That kind of thing. It's not an easy conversation to have with the student or indeed their university tutor, and worse still when spoken English is grammatically incorrect. Personally I don't give two hoots, I'm an immigrant, I love the idiosyncracies of regional dialects and have some respect for poetic license, but professionally I have to mind, especially when sometimes it's just plain wrong and not on purpose. Tricky, potentially embarrassing and hurtful.

It's important for primary school teachers to have very good spelling and grammar. It's also necessary for MFL and English teachers and pretty important for teachers of essay-based subjects.

All teachers should make every effort to use correct language, but some people find it hard. That does not make them bad at teaching their subject. It is difficult enough to recruit and keep good teachers as it is. Rejecting a brilliant maths teacher because he or she isn't a great speller would be lunacy.

It's also important for pupils to see that teachers, like everyone else, aren't perfect at everything and that they still, as adults, need to be able to admit when they don't know something and look it up!

Bottle
Thanks for that.

Funnywizard, this is all news to me. I have just one a few online checks to see if the rules have changed, but can't see that they have. I would be really keen to see a link to something to suggest I am wrong.

www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/i-or-me

Nothing has changed, "me vs. I" still rests with whether the pronoun is the subject or object.

All teachers should make every effort to use correct language, but some people find it hard. That does not make them bad at teaching their subject. It is difficult enough to recruit and keep good teachers as it is. Rejecting a brilliant maths teacher because he or she isn't a great speller would be lunacy.

So higher standards expected of some, but not all.

If they find using correct English hard, they shouldn't be teachers.

There must be a name for the law that states "whenever someone starts a thread complaining about spelling, grammar and punctuation, then their thread will contain such mistakes"

hehehe I can see the OP has tried to post intelligently and 'correctly'
tried too hard and, in so doing turned it into a comedy thread

oh the irony :o

perhaps the law could be the pedant's paradox?

This thread has had me in stitches. I do love people incorrectly correcting others ! As a teacher, I do think there should be a good standard of literacy across the board, no matter which subject. I've encountered very poor spelling in younger teachers, including the dreaded apostrophe errors. If we don't get it right, how are pupils supposed to learn? My pet hate is hearing teachers saying gems such as "Was you down the park?" or "You was, wasn't you?" I'm in Scotland, where 'pour' can be pronounced 'poor', 'pork' can be 'poark' etc. Children then write the words like this (often aided and abetted by support staff). My DD had a teacher who pronounced 'algebra' with a hard g .

On a side-note, I have a friend with dyslexia. She is a fantastic teacher, prepares lessons meticulously and goes the extra mile to ensure her lessons are fabulous. She is amazing, and it would have been such a loss to teaching if she had chosen a different profession.

I'm in Scotland, where 'pour' can be pronounced 'poor

How else would you pronounce it? Sorry if I'm being obtuse!!

I'm not from Scotland and I would say pour/poor/pore in exactly the same way!

Ah, I see. So all three words sound the same in Scotland and the South East, but they don't in some of the counties in between; how funny!

On a side-note, I have a friend with dyslexia. She is a fantastic teacher, prepares lessons meticulously and goes the extra mile to ensure her lessons are fabulous. She is amazing, and it would have been such a loss to teaching if she had chosen a different profession.

Yes. I posted upthread a bit about my son's year 3 teacher, who was a remarkable teacher but sent home some shocking spelling errors (ice-burg for iceberg, for example). Were it not for this teacher, I probably would take a far harder line.

So higher standards expected of some, but not all?

Yes. I would expect the standards of an English teacher or an MFL teacher to be higher because they are actually teaching language as a subject. In essay subjects a teacher needs to be able to correct style, grammar and spelling as well as content.

A maths teacher, for example, should be expected to produce impeccable English when writing reports or letters to parents, or even emails to staff, because those things are easily spell-checked. That doesn't mean they need to be a naturally good speller. I do not think that making occasional mistakes on the board, fir example, should be a deal-breaker.

I have worked with many, many teachers who are not naturally good spellers. If you got rid of all teachers who make spelling mistakes, there would be a massive teacher shortage. And a lot of dedicated and talented people would be put out of a job.

But dyslexia is not just about spelling. Dyslexia can affect organisational skills, ability to understand how to use grammatical structures and how to teach writing skills. For example, Humanities subjects require really high literacy skills and they have to be taught- how to analyse text, how to write analytically- Art requires an ability to analyse and write analytically. You have to be able to deconstruct text and teach students how to produce that writing. MFL teachers will have to be able to teach how to construct grammatically accurate and sophisticated essays in the new GCSE. My point is if you can't do it and you don't recognise it, you can't teach students to do it. Analysis of language and the skills of reading and writing along with fine-tuned organisation and accuracy are at the heart of good writing.
Exam specs award marks for very specific, honed skills. You must be able to teach them.

I have worked with many, many teachers who are not naturally good spellers. If you got rid of all teachers who make spelling mistakes, there would be a massive teacher shortage. And a lot of dedicated and talented people would be put out of a job.

So that's OK then.

It is teachers not taking/able to take responsibility for the literacy requirements of their subject that results in lowered literacy all round. It becomes an English thing, rather than an automatic response to the work that needs to be done across all subjects.

I see this as an entitlement for students, not a burden on teachers.

The employment issues are separate. Low standards of entry for teaching had been in place so long that they are hard to reverse. Bump up the pay and entry requirements and you'd have to fend off fully-literate candidates with a shitty stick.

This will never happen, of course.

So...dyslexic students can't be taught to analyse etc? I better tell that to the ones I've seen get A grades in an essay based subject over the years. And if students can do it, then obviously teachers can. BUT they may need the help of ICT to get there. So what?

holmessweetholmes

"I have worked with many, many teachers who are not naturally good spellers. If you got rid of all teachers who make spelling mistakes, there would be a massive teacher shortage"

There already is a massive teacher shortage.

I never said that feather. you are being overly dramatic. I said dyslexia can affect those things. If it does and you are not able to clearly do those things how can you teach children to write?

There is also a difference between someone having a coping strategy so they can do something themselves and being able to unpick the skill and have the range of strategies to teach it to others- who may need a number of different approaches.

Bump up the pay and entry requirements and you'd have to fend off fully-literate candidates with a shitty stick.

Not the case. It's not the money which is the main issue. It's the lack of respect and the low status which puts people off.