To expect school teachers to actually educate my child?

[ICancelledTheCheque]

Maybe I'm being a bit PFB but this has really irked me.

DD is Y7 in a big academy secondary school. She showed me some work she had done - in three paragraphs there were six spelling errors and five grammatical errors. The teacher didn't mark up a single thing and just put big green ticks and irritating smiley faces on her work and wrote "excellent work" at the end.

But it wasn't excellent work. How is she going to learn if they don't flag this stuff up? Is this the norm these days? Doesn't bode well for GCSEs if so!!

Wow fruit did you take a nasty pill today or something?

I put it in because I wondered whether my level of education (and my profession) required and require very accurate spelling and grammar and this might have been influencing my feeling the need to correct him so I thought I'd ask people who knew better how to approach it. What's so wrong with that?

I have a first class honours degree, and I have been awarded a scholarship for my masters fees (£28k discount for me!)

However, I can see that your child has very high learning potential and I feel shocked and saddened that you do not recognise that yourself, because his SPAG is annoying you due to not being perfect.

In many countries, children do not start school until they are 7. SPAG is not given a thought until much much later. Cherish your sons stories, they are special. Far more special than you realise.

worried We have a phrase 'that's a "crazyEnglish" word' for when my DC sounds out or writes something phonetically that isn't phonetic (which is MOST English)

That draws her attention to it without being critical. It's also helpful if she gets frustrated with spelling, because it's about the CrazyEnglish, not her

I guess I'd be more convinced re current practices if students emerged from school being able to write clearly and with reasonable grammar / written expression. However, many don't, and many think I am pedantic for drawing attention to their writing. They tell me that no one ever complained at school. They don't seem to comprehend that they are even making mistakes. Disclaimer - I'm not referring to all of them, but a significant number do have what I see as limitations in functional literacy and a lack of comprehension re why this matters.

@worriedmum100 - it is wonderful that your son is writing stories, and I don't think you need worry about the spelling - as he learns the correct spellings, they will work their way into his writing.

It sounds as if he has a creative imagination and is expressing thatntheough his writing - and that is something that is really hard to teach someone.

I remember a piece of work I had to do in English class at school when I was about 12 - it was supposed to be an imaginative piece, and I really struggled with that. When we got the work back, I got exactly the same mark as a boy who I always used to compete with - and the teacher told us that he had got a good mark because his piece was so imaginative and creative, but was atrociously badly spelled, punctuated etc, whereas my piece was dull as ditchwater but the grammar, spelling and punctuation were perfect.

I was jealous of him because even then I knew that he could improve his SPAG but I wouldn't really be able to become a more creative writer. I do wonder now if he resented the fact that I got the same mark as him despite the dullness of my piece.

This is a photo of a piece of work my DC2 did when he had been at school for a total of four months (4 months). There is a big red line through it, and the comment tells him that it is too untidy and to do it again without mistakes. The capital U: means "sign: " and demands a parental signiture to acknowledge the comment and the fact the work is too messy and full of mistakes for a child who started school for the first time four months earlier, and that it must be redone.

He hated school from about 4 days in, though fortunately playtime, sport and musicmafe it tolerable, but the fucking heartbreaking thing is that that is bloody good work for a child who at that point had done about 70 short days at school, allowing for weekends and the Christmas holidays.

Is this what some people want for the UK?

anothermommi I nearly choked reading your comment about students from other countries having no analytical skills.

You do realise how patronising that sounds don't you?

And how insulting it is to read for anyone that isn't British?

You need to look at it in the context of many pieces of work.
At our school certain writing is not corrected such as creative and journal as you just want students wriitng and research suggests that too much correction inhibits students' desires to write.

So this teacher may have just wanted her writing-it is not possible to correct all work-150 students and you have 150 pieces of work coming in each week and often twice a week.

You have to choose do you want all work marked well or the teacher rested after putting in a 45-50 hour week rather than a 55-65 hour week?
I choose the former and you can always correct it if it boters you so much.
Teachers work crazy long hours unless they are very lazy ( unusual) an the marking has to be curbed to survive.
Honestly the teacher flicked and ticked that work- it will still have taken 30 mins to do that to 30 pieces.

So YABU.
Correct it yourself. The teaching profession is losing enough teachers as it is- the crisis is coming and when you have people teaching your kids with no qualification you will look back longinly at the days when all you had to complain about was a lack of what you deem appropriate marking.

5 moreminutes- that is excellent work! No wonder Germany makes the best cars if this is how they push them from such a tender age-;((

For those saying that its not good enough (I don't entirely disagree) could you ask 30 of your friends to hand write a review of their favourite film.

It must be at least half a page of hand written prose, and done in 15 minutes.

What I would like you to do, is mark all thirty to the level that you require of teachers including formative feedback that is personal, constructive and not dismissive of the person that performed the task.

If teachers don't have time to properly mark work, something has gone seriously wrong with our education system.

We don't. It has.

5more That is about the level of work that our kids were expected to produce at the very end of first grade, beginning to middle of second grade in their very ordinary German primary (a different Bundesland and system to yours by the looks of it). After four months they hadn't even covered the whole alphabet. Poor boy :-(

fruit really this is my last post on this subject but really you have no right to feel shocked and saddened on behalf of a child you do not know and will never meet and it's beyond patronising for you to assume to judge what I do and do not know about my own child.

TheSmurfsAreHere

"anothermommi I nearly choked reading your comment about students from other countries having no analytical skills.
You do realise how patronising that sounds don't you?"

I said there was a pattern and it did not apply to all ESL students. I welcome your experiences teaching students educated in the Chinese education system and we can discuss analytical skills developed there. Or perhaps we can look at creative skills in Polish students. Asking Libyan students to argue against a view put forward by the teacher how did that work for you?

All these students want to learn skills that are developed by the English education system. Skills that are being brushed aside in the obsession with spelling and grammar. Most young ESL students relish the challenge of critical thinking.

So if you think about what I meant and not just what you think I was saying you might find it less patronising.

I'm a bit of a grammar Nazi. My girls are 8 and I always correct their work. if they learn correct spelling and grammar from a young age, surely that is better than trying to correct them at a later stage.

I think one of the problems is that the teachers today are of the generation where they didn't teach grammar at school, so most of their grammar is appalling! I've corrected the school's prospectus and spoken to the head teacher about it lol. She asked me to be on the board of governors.

As long as correcting them is not suppressing their creativity, that is fine, IMO. But creativity and good content are also important.

I highlight nearly every error. I'm secondary, in a written subject but not English. It's hideously time consuming. Pupils do the corrections. However it seems to have minimal, if any, impact on the later pieces of work so I don't know what the answer is.

My ex has just started working as an English teacher in Rotherham and he is dyslexic!!
He had a dispensation on his degree that said they shouldn't take into account the spelling and grammar !

I hear what everyone is saying about denting confidence etc but I have to agree with Spartacus. I teach at university (in a topic that requires good English) and the standard of some of the coursework is really bad.
Spelling is a major problem (even common words) and don't get me started on the apostrophe! I am really beginning to think they don't teach that AT ALL in schools these days.
Children won't KNOW they've done wrong unless they are told.

In my daughter's school (a while back) each child had a pocket sized book for spellings. In ANY written work they did, wrong spellings were underlined by teacher. Child then had to copy the underlined words into their exercise book and write them out at least 5 times.

That seems to me to be a good idea. Work isn't covered in corrections but children realise they have made mistakes and are encouraged to learn the correct spelling.

Sorry - should have added .... better yet, it stopped awkward parents like me complaining that children were not being taught spelling :)

BTW, I once helped one morning in a week in daughter's primary school.
Teacher asked them to draw a picture (fine) and then wanted me to help some of them write the caption for it - would have been fine - but the caption was ... the majic fairy. I really didn't know what to do. Didn't want to upset teacher but obviously couldn't get children to copy the mistake.

I got my group to write magic fairy but didn't say anything. I know the teacher must have noticed (since they all went on wall and half said majic fairy!) but fortunately she didn't say anything.

Some years ago (maybe 15 ish) when someone I know was training to be a teacher, they marked the homework highlighting spelling errors etc with red pen, and they were told off about it by their teacher mentor. They were told not to correct as it might upset the child with all the red over their work! (Not those exact words but the general gist.) Makes my blood pressure rise just thinking about it. No wonder no one can spell nowadays and don't know their 'their' from their 'there' !!

In regards to "young people nowadays comments".

There are texts written in Latin and Greek complaining about the younger generations inability to spell and punctuate. Be glad you are part of a long historical tradition. Irrelevant, but long.

English teacher here. We highlight five errors per page, objective of the lesson or not. YANBU. Flag it up. Half marks for accuracy in writing for English exams at GCSE means this is a must. Marking is very time-consuming but indicating errors (for pupils to correct in a lesson dedicated to this each month) is essential IMO. None of my pupils has low self esteem as a result and brother do they wonder why they aren't achieving a higher mark for writing!

Neither

I agree with a PP that it doesn't necessarily equate to less errors next time but it does highlight the error. I try to do some small group work as well as class work on SPAG to help further.

Spelling 'mistakes' are not the big deal these days for raising at every opportunity and with each child. However, the teacher is probably collating issues to work on over the coming weeks.