To correct the teacher's spelling?

[Dany0909]

I'm a year 4 TA in a primary school. This year I have a new class and a new teacher.
She's an ok teacher in general, I've definitely worked with better.

Yesterday, she handed out the spelling list and had spelt one of the words wrong. I pointed it out to her privately as I didn't want parents to notice and she got in a huff. She didn't believe me and checked the spelling online before changing it.

Just today, she misspelt three subject-specific words that I'm sure she has been teaching for years so I was surprised she didn't know them. The kids copied them off the board incorrectly but I felt too uncomfortable to say anything.
I'm not going to specify the words so this post doesn't give me away just in case.

Anyway, I'm not really sure what to do. It's annoying because obviously the kids are learning incorrect spellings from her, but at the same time I don't really want to annoy the teacher. I'm not sure if she's dyslexic but surely if you knew you were then you would double check the information you're asking children to copy down. She's not overly nice or welcoming towards me so not sure how to approach it. Should I just leave it???

My Y3 teacher was dyslexic and appalling at spelling, but a fantastic teacher in other ways (she was a brilliant artist and musician; all my basic knowledge of artists comes from the time I spent in her class).

I used to regularly correct her spellings! I think she was embarrassed the first couple of times but then it became a running joke where she'd ask me to double check words she'd written on the board and wasn't sure of. I think that was a great way of handling it and I remember her incredibly fondly.

It wasn't my sentence. I hope you are reading those "thousands" of research theses more closely than you are managing this thread. Also perhaps you are reading too narrowly and applying research thesis linguistic standards to a chat on MN, because of course in the latter, it is entirely context appropriate to use phrases like 'and stuff' to mean examples where individuals or schools have adopted a practice and had positive results, but not submitted this to any form of peer review.

I meant to add: I would absolutely say something to the teacher if I were you (and to SLT if she failed to respond well). I wouldn't be happy if my child were being taught incorrectly, and I would hope senior staff would pick the teacher up on persistent errors.

I used to be a teacher (ironically specialising in English!) and a real pedant for spelling and grammar. However, I put a label saying 'stationary' instead of 'stationery' on the cupboard in my first classroom. At these point, I genuinely didn't know there was a difference. Not sure how or why I didn't know that, but hey, I'm human.

My lovely TA pulled me aside to point it out, in a really friendly way and I was so glad she did. It's now something I know and she taught me how to remember which was round it goes.

I wasn't offended or insulted. I took it as a teaching moment for myself and even told the kids about it the next day, to show them it's ok to make mistakes and fun ways of learning things.

I recall the English Department in the school where I was in charge of the Maths Department having a real strop because we corrected too many spellings and, more importantly, use of words, eg they thought that if a child said I borrowed him £5, instead of I loaned him £5 it didn't matter because 'they knew what they meant'! They wouldn't accept that such words have a specific meaning and if misused could lose a student marks in an exam.
They were happy for us to change their exam marks into a % though, even after we suggested they should have a mark scheme out of 50 or 100 to make it easy.

You only need a grade 4 or above in GCSE English to meet the English requirements to be a primary school teacher in the UK.

@RollerRunner GCSE English grades are based on a lot more than spelling and grammar anyway. I'd say that my spelling is extremely good (I'll wait for the inevitable reply pointing out an error) but I struggled to get C grades in English Language and English Literature because I'm left-handed with very poor handwriting. I didn’t quite cross the threshold for a scribe or extra time.

All you have to do is think of what shop specialises in selling stationery. It's a stationers. Surely no one would spell that word 'stationars', would they? That would look wrong to anyone, I would think. So a stationers sells stationery.

Stationery : e for envelope.

@CustardySergeant

I'm aware of that now, but at the time I wasn't. I'd never seen a shope called a stationers. In fact, I still haven't.

My point is that genuine mistakes are human. No one knows anything. I'm now a published writer and still need to look up the spellings of some words, especially homophones. Practice and practise is a nemisis of mine despite being a professional writer, and I have to check almost every time that I'm using the right one. I'm not ashamed to say I have to check, and occasionally proofread my work and go 'urgh' - wrong use of punctuation or something not grammatically correct.

However, it is how you deal with it that is the important thing. If you get offended or refuse to accept that you're wrong when an error is pointed out to you, then you have an issue. I look at it as learning something new, and teach my children that. It's ok to misspell something or get something wrong, as long as you look at it and learn from it. I told my class about it the next day, asked them if they could spot the mistake and looked at how we could learn the right spelling together. Me owning that mistake was an excellent teaching point, and I purposely put it in the spelling test a few weeks later. They almost all got it right because they'd remembered!

@UtterlyOtterly

Yep. That's how my TA explained it -

StationEry- envelope
StationAry- at standstill

Can I be forgiven due to it being 06:30am..?😂😂

I was using a jokey phrase that I use actually to mean empirical, peer-reviewed research.

I come from a family of educators and I too care deeply about my children’s education, which has so far proved itself in their academic success. I never thought that I knew better than my children’s teachers how to teach, though.

Number of spelling and grammar mistakes - not amount.

Sorry. One of my pet peeves.

I was a TA in a primary school and had to correct a Y2 teacher who had written “monkies” on the boards for the children to copy. He didn’t believe me and went off to look it up! Same teacher also wrote “charcole drawings” as a title on a display board.

A cAr is stationAry.

An Envelope is stationEry.

It's not the mistake itself that matters, it's the failure to accept a correction with good grace. If I make a mistake in my work I want someone to point it out to me ASAP so that I can do something about it.

It's awful that so many of you don't want to say anything as you don't want the teacher taking it out on your child. If they did you could report but instead you let them be taught to spell incorrectly. It's a form of giving in to bullies.

Has anyone noticed how 'etc' is now being widely accepted as 'ect'?

Ect is my biggest bugbear I think.

It's not a new thing. People have done this for decades to my knowledge. Also 'should of' etc.

The first day I was in year 5, our new teacher made a spelling mistake on the blackboard, and claimed he was just testing. It didn't take long to become clear that he really wasn't; these mistakes were quite frequent.

One time he gave the class a worksheet containing several spelling and grammar mistakes - quite a few people returned them with his mistakes corrected. Mum photocopied it and took a copy to the head, came out of there to find another mum waiting to go in with the same sheet. I don't know if any other parents complained (if they did it over the phone, I wouldn't) but the head took him out of class to talk to him.

The following term, yet another parent had gone into the classroom for whatever reason, seen two spelling mistakes on the blackboard and corrected them herself. Teacher thought someone in the class had done it and was NOT happy - that parent went to see him, said she was the one who corrected the spellings and he shouldn't have spoken to the class like that. Teacher's response was "Joe Bloggs (his predecessor who retired the year before) couldn't spell!" (Not sure if that was true, but wasn't really the point!)

After I left, I heard they moved him to teach a year 3 class instead before he eventually left. From what I gather, nothing ever really improved.

When that teacher came up in conversation years later, Mum said she wondered now if he'd been dyslexic. (As to that, I have no idea - at 9 years old, I didn't think of that).

It’s easy to spot the teachers on this thread.

The acceptance of mediocrity is so depressing. It’s NOT okay to actively teach children incorrect spellings, or get in a huff because someone points out that this is what you’re doing.

Sure everyone makes mistakes, but telling a student “oh I taught you something incorrect, let this be a lesson that it’s okay to make mistakes and all humans err” is the very definition of doing your job badly. Would you like a doctor to cock up your diagnosis and simply say “to err is human”? Or your lawyer or your engineer or your architect to cock up their advice or drawings or measurements? All those professionals would be sued. A teacher? Never.

Yes I've heard about this letting them spell incorrectly though the reason was 'the important thing is the child expressing themselves, not the spelling. By correcting them we are hindering their confidence to story tell or create sentences'. I wasn't entirely convinced.

@Vabenejulio People of ALL professions make mistakes. Yes, "even" doctors, lawyers, engineers and architects!!
As an experienced teacher I would be doing my students a disservice by never admitting to the occasional mistake. I absolutely would rather a child in my class has the courage to give things a go and not be worried of failure than to lack confidence in trying due to the fear of getting it wrong.

ajandjjmum · Today 08:19

I usually capitalise the seasons, as well. I also capitalise the points of the compass, which crop up frequently in reports, which I write; Word often objects and sometimes, the QC person "errorises" them to lower case.

Bastards!

If this is because they don't know how a plural is made? Or is it because letters are being omitted.

I'm quite old and we were taught to use apostrophes like that so photo' and 'phone and occasionally we used æ.