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!!

Fancy actually coming up with a counterpoint?? Or is it just a clever name?

FWIW I think Crystal has some good perfectly sound ideas about how we learn language. I'm talking about the reality of how far actual, real kids can be arsed to make the effort. See?

HTH.

We still love you Merchant

Thanks!

Personally, I don't think that having the audacity to think that teachers might actually know about teaching is being on a 'high horse'! But, apparently, every fucker is an expert. Especially if they've read David Crystal.

#armchaircritics

#teamMerchant

(Note my correct mid hashtag correct use of capital for proper noun. It's like I know grammar or something 😮)

Merchant, I'm an old duffer. When I was a child, I lost a point for every spelling mistake AND had to write the word correctly 20 times. It made me bother to look up the words I didn't know from the start. I figured out it was easier in the long run. Are teachers still allowed to do that sort of thing?

So pleased my dc is out of the clutches of 'teachers' like Merchant and now thriving!

Empress If you want to make spelling the main teaching point for a particular piece of work, sure you could do that, yes.

counterpoint Good point you made there. Well done. Excellent work.

David Crystal bleugh!

counterpoint I'd be genuinely interested in the way these new, special teachers are helping your dc to thrive. I wonder what their perspective would be on the whole situation too.

Merchant

YYURYYUBICURYY4ME

Teachers are not helping my son to thrive. He is at Uni and doing it for himself.

You reminded me of his awful dragon of an English teacher who pretty much thought she had a degree in "I know it all".

Like others have intimated, creativity is the stuff of intelligence. Peddling 'rules' (such as they are /are not in the English language) is fodder for the slow witted.

These teacher / school bashing posts really annoy the hell out of me!!

Perhaps if people spent more time educating their own children at home instead of bitching all over Mumsnet, they might see some improvements!

Get a grip people - teachers are only human after all!!

#justsaying

So what are you telling us? That teachers can dish out criticism but can't take it?

counterpoint
I'm baffled by your posts.

Firstly, good, I'm glad your son is thriving. Did he get to uni without any help from teachers? I guess so.

I am definitely not a 'dragon' of an English teacher. I have my weaknesses, but being a dragon is not one of them. There's no reason you should believe me, but there's also precisely nothing you could cite to back up this bizarre assumption. I told you about my experiences of trying to correct spelling, and how the total red pen blitz is a non-starter. That is about it. Can you explain?

You think I'm purporting to 'know it all' simply because I am telling non-teachers about the experiences of teaching? Are you surprised that I started from a position of being quite riled when there had been pages of non-teachers parentsplaining stuff to those who are trained and practised in the profession? Really? What is your profession? Would you like me to explain it to you?

I didn't say a single word about creativity. If you'd successfully inferred anything from my posts it might be that spelling, whilst important, is NOT the be-all-and-end-all of education. So why all the ramblings about 'peddling rules'? Can you explain that? I think it's perfectly possible to see from my posts that I don't hold spelling above other skills. Which is just as well, since it is amongst the hardest things to teach - oh, I seem to have come full circle.

counterpoint

Has David Crystal ever taught a class of children in a secondary school?
It is one thing to lecture and write books but quite another to try and teah a class of 30 11 to 16 year old children.

As for criticism I and other teachers are quite happy to accept it as long as it is based on something solid.

Where was the error @wettunwindee?

Firstly, a lot of kids find grammar really hard. They cannot understand the difference between a comma and a full stop, no matter how many emergency grammar sessions you run. At some point, you have to cut your losses

But at what point? And why not simply deduct marks for poor written expression (to the point of failure, if necessary)? It didn't kill my generation. I'm actually disappointed that I was not taught more grammar than I was.

Most kids don't care. It's hard to make them really, actually care. If they do care, they will be on it already.

You write this about spelling. In post-school education, I see it in relation to many aspects of written expression. Amongst colleagues, we gnash teeth at the way that these students were passed in school leaving us to deal with the (now entrenched) problems. Perhaps losing marks would force them to care? We get a distinct impression that students are never failed because they ^don't" seem to care. Mind you, universities are caring less about such fripperies these days. Customer satisfaction rules the waves!

I'd love it if marking every spelling in red DID have an effect - and, to be honest, as a reflex, I still circle almost all errors. But I have marked errors on COUNTLESS coursework drafts (back when you were allowed to do such things), only to have the final version handed in with the SAME ERRORS STILL PRESENT. Even when it is GCSE COURSEWORK

Then presumably they are also accepting they will have marks deducted for poor writing and this will affect their overall mark?

Yetanother
They do lose marks.

They don't lose all the marks because they misspell some words, or because they tag sentences together with commas. Presumably you want them to?

If their writing is so poor as to be unintelligible, they will fail. There is this weird idea that no kids are allowed to fail. Loads do. This misconception comes, I guess from the same place as 'everything was better in the past' - which, as we know, is a sentiment as old as the hills.

In any case, it is exam boards who are passing kids who you think should have failed, not teachers. We teach to the exams. You know this?

Why blame teachers? It seems to me that teachers frequently get blamed for the problems we are trying to fix. Parents spend time at home not helping with spelling but slagging off teachers; children learn contempt for teachers at home and then - quelle surprise! - those kids are really hard to teach. We've got people like the OP moaning that teachers don't correct enough, people like counterpoint moaning that we all 'peddle rules', and everyone else from inept government to social media telling us how to do our jobs. It's almost as if we can't win. Oh, wait...

Add in well over 50% of children failing to meet a decent pass in some areas of the country (that's a ball park figure before I get asked for specifics) - it is increasingly hard to pass English at GCSE - no more coursework, linear exam, no foundation level.

If you're a child who finds English difficult then you're pretty much bound to fail. Especially if you come from a socially deprived area.

AND, if you don't get the equivocal an old fashioned C grade, you have to resit. Until you do.

But yes, teachers are definitely not correcting enough spellings. Or are peddling rules. Or something,

Boney Back, the recommendation to check out some of Crystal's studies was not because he has to teach kids but to remove the dogmatic approach purveyed above by some 'teachers' regarding grammar. Hence also why I threw in the example of an early form of 'text talk'. Creativity in language and usage are his main points.

It seems the message coming out from the 'teachers' here is that the kids are unteachable! I'm suggesting perhaps it's the methods and expectations that are wrong.

Try this TED talk ...

www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity

counterpoint

I and other teachers (those that I know) will try just about anything to get pupils to learn, but at the end of it all there is the government and their targets, throw in all the other bits that the government wants and there is very little time to do much in depth work at all.