To think teachers should be able to spell

[Brieandcamembert]

I have increasingly noticed recently teachers (often of primary age) who make very basic spelling and grammar errors. Surely having excellent basic skills in this area is an essential criteria for teaching it?

I'm really concerned that we are raising a generation who will have appalling literacy skills.

I have seen the classic "of / have" confusion
I have seen "been" used instead of "being"
I have also seen phonetically similar words interchanged with one another.

MN gets very sniffy about SPaG and tells those who question to go over to Pedants Corner. The inference is, that if what a poster is writing is understandable, it doesn’t matter if their spelling and grammar is incorrect.
I have seen people called cunts and all sorts - there was even an entire thread on just how despicable it is of anyone to point out any aspect of SPaG in anyone else's posting, ever, with a massive pile-on of people queuing up to say just how shit anyone who did this is.

area is an essential criteria for teaching it?
The singular is criterion and the plural is criteria, which any grammar pedant would know.

@Musmerian but teachers don't JUST teach spelling

I think it depends on the subject. For example my first maths teacher in highschool was incredibly dyslexic and couldn’t spell for beans. He made a lot of jokes about it.

On the other hand my sister, who is very dyslexic, is head of literacy at her school… I can’t say I agree with that at all but she gets very offended if I say anything about it.

I would say that if the teacher remarks that they can’t spell (like my old maths teacher) then children know not to copy them. However if there’s a teacher teaching children the incorrect spelling/grammar and insisting it’s correct, that’s a problem.

As previous posters have said, there’s also the issue of the teacher recruitment crisis.

@WhenSheWasBad

Teachers do have to pass a literacy and numeracy test before being accepted to train.

I’ll admit I’m crap at spelling. I teach science (mostly Physics). I tell the kids to pick me up on my spelling if/when I get something wrong.
No shame in making mistakes, we just put them right.

My DH, also a physics teacher, did exactly the same! And his pupils took great delight in doing so. He was quite chuffed about it.

Teachers have to have both English qualifications plus an additional literacy test before being able to qualify as a teacher

@maddy68

Teachers have to have both English qualifications plus an additional literacy test before being able to qualify as a teacher

Not all teachers qualify as a teacher. It might have changed now but I remember a teacher who was recruited with no PGCE.

The messages on this thread demonstrate how difficult SPaG can be. Where are all these perfect people going to be found? Even if they do exist, they might not want to be primary school teachers. I used to teach in a traditionally male dominated subject area. My students got excellent GCSE and A-level results but a lot of men liked to try to catch me out on my subject knowledge. Some of them had much better subject knowledge than me, which they felt very smug about, but I don’t think many of them would have been very good at teaching.

In UK state schools you have to have Qts

@maddy68

In UK state schools you have to have Qts

No you don't

You also don't have to have a PGCE

One solution would be to have specialist teachers teaching younger age groups. This would require more funding though. As well as funding issues, teachers wouldn’t know the children as well and some of younger children would struggle to cope with lots of different teachers.

I recruit mid level/senior roles, we now set a written assessment. The reason for this was that literacy, despite a glowing CV, was so poor. The role requires written communication, in the form of emails. They're often very detailed and need to accurate, and spelling needs to be correct.

Some of the examples I've seen are so poor. Text speak, spelling, grammar. A mess really and I'd love to what happened or didn't happen in school.

@maddy68

Teachers have to have both English qualifications plus an additional literacy test before being able to qualify as a teacher

GCSE grade 4. The skills tests were scrapped in 2020. It's a low bar.

Dyslexia in a secondary school subject teacher - fine
In a primary teacher, not fine. If you have a problem in a certain area, you don't apply for a job where it's important to be able to do it accurately.

I was horrified at some of the spelling and punctuation errors that my fellow teachers (and my headteacher!) made. They weren't even in tricky areas. Really basic mistakes that weren't made out of carelessness, just ignorance of the correct spelling/punctuation/grammar.

It's a real worry, as the shortage of teachers becomes more and more of an issue. Just having someone in front of a class of 7 year olds isn't enough. And the problem will replicate itself as fewer and fewer children get taught the correct SPAG and see examples from their teacher of the the wrong spellings.

A mess really and I'd love to what happened or didn't happen in school.

You’d love to what? As you’ve illustrated, anyone can make mistakes and it’s more likely poor proofreading than anything else.

@annabell22

Some teachers have dyslexia- it doesn't mean that they shouldn't become a teacher.

I respectfully disagree

@NeedAHoliday2021

Our head teacher’s English is awful. He emails with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and no paragraphs. While it may not be his strong point, could he just ask someone to proof read all-parent emails? I think it reflects poorly on the school and their expectations.

It will have been written by the school administrator then signed by the Headmaster.

@Nicholethejewellery

Are you saying I should just accept my kids being taught incorrect SPAG or not being taught it at all because their teacher might be dyslexic?

Unless you are comfortable with people being discriminated against because of a disability, then yes you must accept this.

People with disabilities have enough difficulties in gaining employment as it is. Customers - which is effectively what children are in relation to their teachers - have to accept that service may not always be up to the same standard.

For instance I was buying a box of Peroni in Tesco a few years ago, I went to the only checkout with no queue. There was a gentleman with learning disabilities being trained, he literally threw the box around and smashed one of the bottles. I just had to accept it because he was doing it to the best of his ability. (The supervisor got me a new box of course.)

Sorry but that's appalling. He shouldn't be in that job if he's likely to do something like that. If it had been a large glass bottle for example, which he smashed, it could have injured somebody/a child. As a disabled person I fully respect equality in the workplace but safety must ALWAYS come first. Hence why you don't see Flight Attendants in wheelchairs or extremely overweight for example - safety.

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll

Some teachers have dyslexia- it doesn't mean that they shouldn't become a teacher.

I wouldn't want to exclude anybody on the basis of something that can be worked around, but are there not sometimes circumstances that might mean that a certain job just isn't for you? Should being tone deaf stop you from being a music teacher or orchestra conductor? Should anxiety and poor spatial awareness stop you from driving buses or lorries for a living? Should being colour blind stop you from getting a job in the Dulux development labs? Should being 6'6" stop you from being a jockey? Should being 4'6" tall stop you from being a professional basketball player?

I do personally think that being able to spell, punctuate and use grammar properly is essential for somebody whose job it is to teach it to others - especially at primary level, where they may never have heard/learned words that you introduce to them before; secondary children and upwards will have experience and better critical skills and thus more likelihood of recognising that a small part of what you're teaching them might not be correct.

I never judge tradespeople who produce invoices with spelling mistakes in the least, as that isn't the skill for which I hired them; but then I wouldn't in any way hold it against a teacher if they couldn't rewire a house or tile a bathroom, whereas I would seriously have an issue with a plumber who connected up the hot and cold taps the wrong way around.

THIS THIS THIS!!!

@Nicholethejewellery

Are you saying I should just accept my kids being taught incorrect SPAG or not being taught it at all because their teacher might be dyslexic?

Unless you are comfortable with people being discriminated against because of a disability, then yes you must accept this.

People with disabilities have enough difficulties in gaining employment as it is. Customers - which is effectively what children are in relation to their teachers - have to accept that service may not always be up to the same standard.

For instance I was buying a box of Peroni in Tesco a few years ago, I went to the only checkout with no queue. There was a gentleman with learning disabilities being trained, he literally threw the box around and smashed one of the bottles. I just had to accept it because he was doing it to the best of his ability. (The supervisor got me a new box of course.)

So you didn’t accept it, you got a new box. Accepting it would have been taking the box with the broken ones. If you’re going to use this as a comparison, surely the supervisor getting you a new box would be the equivalent of the school providing the children with a separate teacher for SPAG.

@SpringsSprung

It will have been written by the school administrator then signed by the Headmaster

Not in any of the primary schools I’ve worked in. All newsletters had a large section written by the head. I worked for a headteacher who wrote so poorly that the school admin person had trouble working out what the headteacher was actually trying to say.

[quote ClaudiusTheGod]@SpringsSprung

It will have been written by the school administrator then signed by the Headmaster

Not in any of the primary schools I’ve worked in. All newsletters had a large section written by the head. I worked for a headteacher who wrote so poorly that the school admin person had trouble working out what the headteacher was actually trying to say.[/quote]
Yep. My DH was a deputy head. The school admin quietly sent every letter the Head sent to parents, to my DH to proof read (and change the many errors) before she got them sent out.

@worriedatthistime

With which part of my post are you taking issue? What have I described as discrimination that can not correctly be described as discrimination - to the extent that I apparently don't know what the word discrimination means?

@Fairislefandango

Btw, what are people criticising in the grammar of the OP's first sentence? Somebody mentioned splitting an infinitive (a highly disputed 'rule' anyway, which many grammarians consider to be old-fashioned and redundant). There is no infinitive in the OP's first sentence!

The split-infinitive pedant doesn't understand what an infinitive verb is

She seems to be referring to this
I have increasingly noticed
in which @Brieandcamembert has put an adverb between an auxiliary verb and a past participle. Nothing wrong with it. Nothing to do with infinitives!