To think teacher should know the difference

[Marey9]

Between there, their and they’re? Just wondering as a few posts have gone up by the same teacher not using them correctly. For example yesterdays was ‘we are proud of there behaviour’

Grammer?🤔🤪🤣🤣🤣

I know the difference but my SM posts and texts don't always demonstrate that. I swear autotext does it's work inbetween me reading a post back and pressing send sometimes, which is very embarrassing!

I would expect anything posted on school SM to be checked and double checked though.

I think it is worth considering why this is happening:

• Overwork. As a pp mentioned, there are strategies someone who finds grammar / spelling harder can use, but where teachers are massively overloaded, there is no time for checking etc.
• Overload of senior and admin staff. When I first trained, heads and admin staff would have had capacity to check communications. Now they don’t.
• Recruitment and retention. Teaching is not a respected or desirable career, nor is it sustainable long term. So there is in many schools a churn of young teachers with low grades, and a lack of experienced, highly educated ones.
• Lack of money. Young, early career teachers are cheap. Additional staff are axed (I used to get my TA to proofread anything I sent out; my Head asked me to proofread). With 1 adult per class of children who absolutely cannot be left unsupervised for a moment, that checking is no longer possible.
• Parental antagonism. Where a school’s experience of parents us a daily flood of complaints, verbal and sometimes physical abuse, it can be hard, in the presence of a million competing demands, to prioritise perfect communication.
• Proliferation of communication channels. The weekly printed newsletter was manageable. Website; newsletter; Dojo; school social media; e-mail; text, many updated daily - hard to maintain the same quality when it is nobody’s ‘main job’.

As parents , and members of society, what can we do to mitigate these underlying factors?

I think many professions are suffering from the loss of 'secretaries'. I worked in a bank way back and nothing was sent out that hadn't been typed by a secretary. When it all changed to staff doing their own letters, the quality was shocking. Fwiw the secretary was often the most senior and wel paid female member of staff in the branch in those days.

The same has happened in schools. Our HT's PA has just retired. She was an old fashioned executive PA and she corrected all the staff's correspondence without them even knowing (and yes, the HT and teaching staff needed it more than you'd imagine). That won't happen with her replacement.

Come off it. This is not ok. It’s embarrassing. 😆

🤣🤣🤣

They should be getting it right, but I’d make sure you’re 100% sure it’s the teacher who has written it before raising it. I say this as a teacher who often types messages (correctly) onto a Google Doc only to have admin staff type it up (incorrectly) onto a fancy newsletter template rather than just copy and pasting. It’s not ideal that it’s wrong in this scenario, but it’s not the same as someone who may be making slides/worksheets etc for students getting it wrong.