@TheSockMonster
Looking through DD’s books at a school open day 2 years ago, I spotted something along the lines of ‘her Mum said “take this basket of cakes to Aunt Martha and be careful because there fragile”. She put on her boots and started walking towards her aunty’s house’
‘Aunty’s’ had been underlined in green pen and she had been asked to write ‘aunties’ out 5 times at the bottom of the page. ‘There’ remained unchallenged.
Same teacher used to confuse ‘thank you’ with the noun ‘thankyou’.
I never did pluck up the courage to say anything. She is an intelligent and educated woman and it made me wonder what mistakes I’m making without realising!
The last time I had any of my creative work corrected was when I was 11. It was the first piece of creative work I'd handed in for secondary school and it was about a lost cat - the teacher painstakingly crossed out every onomatopoeicism and replaced with the word she had decided was correct.
I was not impressed, as anybody who has cats knows, a 'mew' does not REMOTELY RESEMBLE a 'miaou', 'miaow', 'miaowwww', 'Wowowowowowow', 'Eeep', 'Ack-ack-ack-ack' or 'Prrrrrpppp'.
I protested on the grounds that if you aren't allowed to say 'He said', 'She said', 'They said' and 'It said', you certainly can't replace another species' entire dialogue with one inappropriate word.
As a result, I became 'That Child'. The one who would correct teachers' spelling mistakes.
The only words I had difficulty in learning the rules for (as nobody ever taught them - most likely didn't know, either) were practice and practise.
I never had an issue with people who clearly had never seen a word written down and were going on their local accent or were dyslexic, but what drives me to distraction are people in a position to know better and/or have the temerity to lecture others when they are utterly wrong*.
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See people from London - not Northern/Irish/etc - who yell at you that you're pig ignorant, it's HHHHHHHAITCH and you're just trying to sound posh when they've overheard you spell something with an Aitch.
This meant that when inflicted with an awful, awful head teacher at one job, I had finally had enough when we were sent yet another a missive/Potteresque Howler littered with errors - I printed it off, got the required pens of a thousand colours and the oh-so-important custom stamps and not only did I mark it, I assessed them as working towards level 4c, and made some relevant comments (minimum of two paragraphs each, as per said missive) under What Went Well and Even Better If. Including a recommendation to read Chapter 4 - Percentages of the lower level Mathematics text book (because they were also incapable of calculating changes correctly).
Fortunately, they never did find out who was responsible.