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!!

Gives self must try harder sticker from brasty

Do you know how long it takes to do marking?

My friend was told by her DS (7 or 8 yo)'s teacher that they don't teach the times tables at school so this was something my friend and her DH need to teach him at home. We were both shocked!

Do you really want an excellent piece of writing by an 11 year old completely covered in discouraging spelling corrections

Diddums. Why do we treat children with kid gloves these days? If something is wrong, be it spelling or grammar etc then BLOODY MARK IT SO!

I took this exact issue with a teacher at a secondary school open evening. His excuse was 'they don't want to demoralise the child'. FFS, give children some credit! Children generally WANT to learn and improve. How can they do that if teachers are pussy-footing around them, too scared to point out mistakes in case they are demoralised?

No wonder our education system is so poor compared with other parts of the world.

My DH had to ask his year 11s to write the first letters of their names in a capital letter this week. He doesn't pull them up on anything usually but he doesn't teach English. He teaches all kids once a week up to GCSE so has so much marking to do - he just has to get through it quickly.

I think if they only marked assessments etc they might be able to have the time to look at all the content.

There are a couple of schools that have taken this on board and seen better results.

www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2016/nov/29/teacher-schools-marking-policy-students-work

brasty: So so I. 'I want' doesn't get, though. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Wanting to mark every piece of work doesn't put more hours in the day. It isn't possible.

*do

Where do you suggest teachers find the time to mark everything with a fine toothcomb, dancegirl?

Also, if I'm giving a child feedback I expect them to act on it. I have dedicated time in class to improve work. I can only spend a certain amount of time doing this, as I have to get through the curriculum. There is little point in going through work in fine detail but then students having no time to act on the feedback.

There are a lot of reasons every single error is not picked up on.

I know how long marking takes. Which is why I said even a quick - some spelling and grammar mistakes - is better than nothing.

Dancer Probably depends on the child. My DD2 has quite low confidence and needs a lot of geeing up. I am delighted by some of the work she is managing to produce in y7. If it was being returned with every spelling and grammar mistake marked, I'm pretty sure she would start saying 'what's the point, I'll get it all wrong' , whereas now her confidence is increasing to the point where I can point out a few spellings and she'll accept it.

But the bottom line is I don't think the teachers have time to deep mark everything.

What was the learning objective?

I don't correct all spelling and grammar errors, but I would make a note that they were happening and then plan a lesson that addressed that particular error.

And once again, don't blame teachers. We haven't devised the curriculum or the objectives or the assessment criteria. That's handed down to us from central government where it was written by people whose only experience of education is that they went to school 40 years ago.

QueSera There is no way the school don't do any times tables because they are crucial to every aspect of maths and the biggest bugbear of mine at school is that so few children know them. The errors I encounter in maths most frequently are times tables.

But what they often mean is that, when we were at school, times tables were actively drummed into us, and were a focus in their own right. Nowadays, schools don't have time to do that as there is so much in the primary curriculum that we didn't cover until secondary school and it's not a priority of the governments (although the children are expected to know them). What the schools mean is that the parents are expected to do the drumming in at home because there simply isn't enough time at school.

I don't know about secondary, but it is impossible at primary to reach 'expected standard' if you make spelling and grammatical errors.

*government's

Totally agree this is very poor on the part of the teacher. The simple reason being children are expected to be grammatically correct with no spelling errors in their gces, a levels, and uni. Not correcting spelling errors or grammar simply misleads the child, it's not the parents job to correct their homework and although some will do, it cannot be expected as many won't. This is no way to teach and will leave many kids struggling at exam time.

brasty - that isn't useful feedback though, unless you are then going to allow time in class for the child to identify the errors themselves (if they know what is wrong, they would have got it right!) and correct them.

I do not write feedback unless I know I can ensure it's acted on. General feedback is worse than useless.

But Ooh, literacy is not just for English teachers. It is for all teachers to point out, discuss, remind students. English teachers teach critical literacy.

Many of my English subject students have come into my room, sat in the same place, been taught by the same teacher (me) and had vastly different expectations re making an effort with literacy because I was teaching them a different subject.

All teachers need to be sending the message that this is important - until there is consistency with this, English teachers are fighting a losing battle.

I'm a stickler for it though as grammatical perfection is a key requirement of my job!

A little awkward then that the sentence before it had an error then. I'd suggest a vocative comma in the sentence above too.

As others mentioned, the fact the work was ticked and mistakes not ringed doesn't mean that the teacher didn't see them. They may have decided it was important to focus on the content and structure of the essay.

But it wasn't excellent work

According to you?

I frequently praise people despite them not being perfect. It can have wonderful effects. Also, it's frowned upon to write "this is shit" on a student's essay nowadays.

Totally agree this is very poor on the part of the teacher

Don't blame the teacher-blame the school marking policy or blame the government for not funding enough staff to make deep marking every piece of work possible.

I can't imagine teachers would have the time to educate your child, if they had to mark every single piece of work x 30 children intensely?
Maybe that was the 25th piece looked at with bad spelling and the teacher made a decision to cover grammar spelling at the next lesson, but didn't have the time to write that down x 30.
Not marking is no indication of not teaching.
Yabu

Bluntness100: Teachers do not have time in the working day OR when they get home to do an 'adequate' job, then, in your eyes. Honestly, as a teacher of English I work all the hours God sends and so do my colleagues. We don't touch the sides of the marking we would all like to do. I always make myself feel better by asking, okay, if j resigned and gave my school the chance to hire someone else, could that person reasonably do what I am not doing? And the answer is no. I am well-qualified, I work very hard and I care massively about my students: who else are they going to get?

Teachers in the UK mark for specific purposes - that piece was presumably marked for contents not SPAG.

It doesn't really sound "marked" for content either tbh, but not every piece has to be marked for every possible target, otherwise a 3 paragraph quick mid week homework would need at least 3 hand written paragraphs of comments by the teacher and all the areas to improve would be discouraging.

When I was at school work was marked for contents and for spelling but separately - so there were a maximum number of marks available for SPAG and a separate maximum available for content - that meant that although I was utterly unable to spell until I was about 14 I would get 4 or 5/10 for SPAG (my punctuation and grammar were generally fine) and 8 or so out of 10 for content, but inevitably lose the 5 spelling marks. I guess that was fine, although relatively pointless as I was aware I couldn't spell...

When you over mark for spelling quite a lot of children will seriously limit their vocabulary and how much they write to avoid risking making spelling mistakes which means that instead of learning and improving their spelling they simply produce inferior content.

Kids our part of Germany have every single SAPG mistake marked every single time and have to write their work out again if their hand writing is not absolutely perfect (fountain pen by year 2) with no allowance made for ability, and far less interest in their original content in the first few years (even when the homework is a comprehension and all the answers are correct the only comment will be a negative one on the hand writing from the old school teachers, and marks are knocked off for every spelling mistake even when the answer is correct and written as a full sentence)... Its a different system, I'm pretty sure it isn't better in every way, though it does rank higher on the PISA league tables which rank average over all levels in native language, maths and science achieved by age 15...

Bluntness100

The simple reason being children are expected to be grammatically correct with no spelling errors in their gces, a levels, and uni

This is of course very simply untrue.

For the most part GCSE and A level work is not being marked for spelling, aside from English language. English literature papers were not marked for spelling a few years ago, and neither were most other subjects except English language. Spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors create a bad impression in many contexts, but if there are not too many of them then spelling errors in particular will not prevent anyone from getting top grades at A level and a first class honours degree, especially given that assignments and dissertations are produced on a computer. As long as a student has the ability to select the right correction offered by a spell checker they will be fine.

I haven't RTFT but I can be almost certain the the majority view is teachers are overworked, they can't mark everything, if it matters that much just teach the child yourself. Teachers are beyond reproach in all circumstances. It an unwritten MN rule.

FWIW: How can a teacher read/comprehend it enough to mark it and express positivity (smiley faces) but not enough to mark up spellings/grammar?

A while back on another 'teachers work eleventy million hours a year' type thread it was revealed that despite us having a national curriculum and nationally imposed standards of achievement, EVERY individual teacher makes their own lesson plan for every lesson. From scratch. (I was floored by this mass duplication and utter lack of efficiency). The government needs to employ one small team of lesson-plan writers to write and roll out those plans. Teachers then need only review and tweak to their particular class and style.This frees up time to make marking a valuable tool in highlighting strengths and areas of improvement rather than an excuse to use a coloured pen to do a couple of ticks and make the job look done.

As you said here, you haven't RTFT.

I'm sure that's why your tone is so dismissive and rude.

To me it would depend on whether these things never get pointed out or whether it was a one-off because this particular exercise was focusing on other things.

It's like football coaching or music coaching or anything else: in one session the coach might decide to focus on a specific aspect of technique or expression (in the case of music), and then you wouldn't necessarily want to distract the student's attention by filling the feedback with other things.

As for spelling and grammar at uni, I would deduct marks for consistent poor spelling, certainly for any spelling mistakes that affected comprehension (as they sometimes do). Also for apostrophe errors. Whether that made that First slip out of your grip or not would depend on how borderline you were. But I would not mark down an otherwise brilliant First to below the borderline simply because it contained one spelling mistake.

I challenged my son's science teacher at a Year 10 parents' evening about uncorrected spelling and grammar in his homework.

The teacher explained that in the GCSE exam the total marks available for perfect grammar and presentation were 2. Even the children less able at spelling and grammar would get 1 mark. Though he would like them all to write perfectly he felt his priority was getting them to use the correct scientific terms, give full answers, and demonstrate their understanding.

here some schools do something similar with schemes that do exist. But they are not ideal and it can take almost as long to 'tweak' an existing plan for your current cohort as it can to write one from scratch because you have to look across the week for progression of skills and match them to your class's needs/previous learning/etc