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!!

YetAnotherSpartacus: I had no issue with the parent pointing out the error.

I say it on MN but tone down my distaste for the tedium that is teaching spelling in the staff room.

I teach spelling. I think it is important. However, there are a lot of other skills that I think are significantly more important and life enhancing than spelling.

This whole thread is about one teeny, tiny rather tedious aspect of the English school curriculum with parents obsessing about it's importance. Posters who struggle to read for detail and spot inference are banging on about spelling. I despair.

I find the contempt for teachers and schools on these threads so infuriating.

I'm a secondary English teacher and I do teach spelling and grammar. I do mark errors when I see them.

I don't proofread every student's book everyday because that would involve me not sleeping

I make a professional judgement about marking as I do with any other aspect of my job. I am held accountable for my decisions by my line manager. If I'm getting it wrong, measures are put in place to ensure I improve. Don't worry, there's a lot of accountability in education.

Before I came into teaching I thought I knew it all. I didn't. Just because you went to school, doesn't mean you understand anything particularly useful about the teaching profession.

Of course there are some teachers who are better than others. I'm really hot on marking now, in my first couple of years in the job - not so hot. I was trying my best but as someone new into the profession, I obviously had areas of weakness. The kids still did well. Maybe my energy and enthusiasm in the classroom compensated...

What is clear to me now, is that for me to do every aspect of my job as well as I could, I'd need either 1/3 less students or 1/3 less contact hours. That's not the reality I deal with. In fact, funding is getting tighter so I continually make judgements about where to cut corners. Sometime this will be not correcting every spelling error. FWIW, it's a lot quicker to tick and flick than it is to correct all spellings.

This is crap. Engaged parents, like most of you on this thread will (resentfully) pick up the slack in the form of tutors, extra homework etc. Kids with parents who have less time or money resources will achieve less well.

It's shit. Most teachers and schools know it. We work incredibly hard to try and make it work as well as it can for as many kids as possible. Most teachers I know are dedicated, hard working and intelligent.

How about working with schools and your kids' teachers instead of assuming they're lazy idiots who think that a green smiley face is useful feedback? If your daughter's English teacher thinks this, she needs to talk to her Head of Fuculty but I suspect it's not quite as simple as that...

good reading (if you got this far)

Faculty Faculty Faculty

So what happened in the state sector in the last thirty years that now prevents teachers being able to mark for both spelling and grammar. As said, my teachers did it, but they used to have free periods and mark before or after school. Now state school teachers have to do 6 classes a day on average, which wasn't the case before?

Bluntness100:

Oh god, where to start?

• Differentiation
• Frequent and repetitive data entry
• Setting up, carrying out, tracking and reporting on interventions
• 'Round robins' on SN needs
• Email!
• Handing in physical lesson plans
• Power Point culture - our school requires a PP for every lesson, with different lines of text in different colours

Honestly, you don't know the half of it!

I think what is being missed here is the question of how much merely pointing out spelling errors will actually help a child to improve.

I know that, when I was at primary school, every error was pointed out and we had to write out the mis-spelled words. I am not, however, convinced that it made any difference at all. Is that a good way to learn?

We are time strapped and the children don't have the time to go over each and every spelling error. We need efficiency in all things so we need to ensure that everything we do drives the learning forwards.

Writing out the 12 spelling mistakes made in a piece of work achieves what, exactly? How does it help the child to improve?
It takes a lot of time and is only superficially solving the issue.

Picking out one important keyword and allowing the child to spend time focusing on that one word is better use of time than quickly writing out all 12 mistakes - so that is how I have (historically) marked upper KS2 children's work.

Lower down in KS1, the idea is to emphasise phonics and the learning of high frequency and common exception words and I don't know of a single primary school class where huge amounts of time aren't spent on those basics every single day.

We have a crazy language and learning to spell is actually really difficult.

Spelling in primary schools is a massive deal and we spend a LOT of time on spelling and grammar.

I don't know so much about secondary school marking policies.

The other thing I would emphasise when it comes to spelling is the importance of reading.

For me, the single most important thing a parent can do to help their child is to read and encourage reading. So much of spelling is recognising when I word 'looks wrong' and that only comes with wide exposure to the written word.

I don't know what the answer is, but I do believe that teachers are doing their best with the time they have.

I'm not in mainstream anymore, although I am still teaching and my challenges are slightly different in that my children are deaf and don't have the same access to phonics for spelling, so we have to use different techniques. Spelling tests, though, are largely ineffective.

When I was at school in the 1980s, teachers marked books, corrected spelling and grammar and then put a grade and short comment at the bottom of each piece of work. They made the grade up.

Now, when I mark, I have to give each piece of work a mark in line with external assessment criteria. This means I can't just go B+ - really good vocab, how about tackling your spelling?

Now I have to go, in line with the school's marking criteria, that piece of work would be a high level 4. If Harry is a level 4 student this is fine. Feedback always needs to be linked to assessment criteria so I can't just make something up from my knowledge and expertise as a teacher in 1986 might have done. Sometimes I might disagree with the assessment criteria but no matter! The assessment criteria overrules my first in English from Cambridge. What do I know?

So I'm giving Harry a 4 and then I think: "Shit! Harry's a level 7 student!!!" If I give him a 4, his parents might go mental, my line manager might go mental, I might have to get some intervention for Harry. This will take hours of my time. Shit! Shit! Shit!" So I re-read to see if I've made a mistake. If Harry was a grade 2 student, I would work through a similar process of panic.

In the end, I enter Harry's 4 on my spreadsheet resolving to reassure him, his parents, my line manager that this is just a temporary blip/ Harry is dead lazy and needs to pull his finger out/ Harry might be dyslexic/ Maybe it's hormones...

So, in a nutshell- that's the difference...

Weird they can't retain teachers.

bluntness see above

Im being slightly hyperbolic btw. But you get the idea...

What has gone wrong in state education?

The data.
Oh. The data.

Especially now we don't have levels.
My school is trying to implement a new spreadsheet system to monitor progress. It is full of glitches and errors and we have all inputted, changed and re-entered the same set of data 5 times this half term already.

And for who's benefit?

Not the children's.

And the initiatives.

There is so much time creating 'evidence'

We did a practical lesson in maths - so we have to take photos and stick them in books and write comments on the children's practical work. All for Ofsted. Not for the children.

This is what is taking up our time. This is what is detracting from the basics.

Not very hyperbolic though, Running. I can see why it's hard for non-teachers to get their heads around what could possibly be causing overwork in the teaching profession.
I mean, what should teachers really have to be doing? Plan lessons, teach lessons, mark books, have the odd staff meeting or training day. What else would thete be to do? And yet...

Teaching is not an activity that lends itself to real time reporting.

Yy to the effing data. The data has become the whole POINT of education instead of just a tool. Abolishing league tables would be a good start. Stop putting schools in competition with each other, and thereby stop making it necessary profitable for schools to cherry pick, skew their data and design kids' education purely on the basis of what the numbers will look like compared with the national average/local schools/whatever bonkers benchmark the government came up with on the back of an envelope last week.

Yes, eolian.

I have 6 children in my class. 6. I know each and every one backwards and inside out. It is one of the massive benefits of not being in a mainstream class of 30.

Yet I am still plotting them on graphs like** little statistics.

Does it make any difference to how I teach them?

Absolutely not. I know them. I know what they need and what their next steps are.

The data is such a massive waste of my time. Just to prove I'm doing my job.

It gives me the rage.

Runningissimple - here in France teachers use a mark scale out of 20 exactly as they please. In a well run school (like my children's) this works beautifully about 90% of the time. We can live with the 10% of teachers who never give a mark above 16/20 and have a class average of 9/20 because it shows up across the board that their marking is out of line with that of their colleagues. They either move into line or move on...

I generally support the approach taken by teachers to marking as long as there is some rigour taken with SPAG. But then you hear from teachers like Moomin who are so out of touch with the reality of modern workplaces that I start to wonder if my support is misplaced.

It does explain why I spend so much of my time teaching bright, degree-educated twentysomethings spelling and grammar, though. Funnily enough spellcheck doesn't pick up many of the vagaries of English spelling, let alone problems with good grammar. Not all my peers bother - they just let the poor spellers and those who haven't been taught to proof read effectively to languish.

And yes, it's important that these young people acquire these skills otherwise they will have no hope of getting anywhere near the 'well paid executive jobs' with PAs - or even the jobs of the PAs.

Running - that sounds horrific and I wonder how many people reach know the detail of just how much we've hamstrung our teachers.

Journalists use copy editors? What publications on what planet? Do you mean subs? Are you aware how few publications have subs any more?

Can't speak for the other professions but speaking as a journalist, this is spectacular bollocks. If I am commissioning and I get copy in that is full of spelling and grammar errors - and yes, I've edited a fair amount of those in my time - I am distinctly unimpressed. And don't commission again from them.

Yes to obsession with data and league tables being the problem.

It's going to get worse. The new GCSE is marked on a bell curve designed to fail over 1/2 of students - no matter how good they are.

bobchic I work with colleagues from all over the world. They cannot believe the English education system and they are all relieved to get back to Canada/ Europe/ US where they can focus on "what matters". It's quite an indictment of the English system.

JassyRadlet one of the skills that I value and try to teach is not making assumptions. I went into teaching as a mature student prior to teaching I worked for a management consultant for 15 years.

I spent a lot of time reviewing procedures in a variety of work places. It is several years ago but I think in terms of IT usage the world will not have moved backwards. Did you assume I went into teaching straight from Uni? Oh dear.

Please feel free to disagree but don't make ill founded assumptions.

Runningissimple - the English system treats teachers as if they were machine tools who generate computer reports and DC as if they were manufactured goods on a production line. The school system then becomes a sorting tool. It's horrific.

I love my children's French school. Just love it!

mother sorry about that, as you spotted journalism is not an area I know well.

Can I assume most of your work is word processed? If this is the case poor spelling and grammar is massively lazy and rude. To send it to another professional is disrespectful and indicates a lack of concern and commitment.

My point is not that spelling doesn't matter. My point is that spelling in handwritten work is becoming less and less important. We don't need to memorise spelling we need to be able to recognise correct spellings, a different skill.

No assumptions made here, Moomin. To be honest, I didn't give a moment's thought to your background or your path into teaching.

Based entirely on what you've written, you seem to have a very old-fashioned view of how modern workplaces operate and a little too much faith in the effectiveness of computer software to deal effectively to cover up weaknesses in people's SPAG abilities.

And your idea that most people will have admin staff to cover their flaws without having to work their way up with those flaws exposed is quite touching, really.

But then, I have had to send back lots of work to some management consultants for sloppiness, too. Others are great, though.

anothermoomin - as another former management consultant may I say that I disagree entirely with your position on spelling!

Motherinferior, I think some can underestimate the need in some workplaces - and journalism is definitely one - to be able to work quickly and accurately and get things right the first time.

It needs muscle memory in spelling and particularly in grammar. And we do young people a disservice if we don't try to equip them with those skills.