Correcting Teaching Assistant's grammar and spelling

[UpSheGoesJosephine]

If you were a TA in a primary school, would you be comfortable correcting a fellow TA if they spelt something incorrectly or used bad grammar. Such as, 'I done this' or pacific instead of specific.

Had a Head Teacher who didn’t know there was affect and effect. I had to explain the difference.

Well you shouldn’t assume that one school reflects all TAs. Unless you checked every TA’s qualifications at your children’s school you can’t know that. Many highly qualified people choose TA roles because the hours work around their own childcare. You can criticise the poor pay without making sweeping statements about their education!

As a parent on the rare occasion, I cross out and correct anything that comes home incorrectly, but don't make any other deal of it, but being honest my Y2 son would correct them first, he's far more interested in correcting mistakes than any sense of hierarchy or subtlety!
If a TA hasn't learnt yet it's probably not going to change, some people don't have a mind for spelling.
Most of the value of a TA is sitting with the children and helping them read and support them with their learning, probably the negative effect of spelling mistakes is not going to be a major issue. Same goes for parents, even parents with English as a second language can have a massive impact on their children's learning.

I'll just leave this here as method for correcting poor English...

I remember having to spend a few weeks training DD when she was about 6 to stop saying "I done". There were written exercises, role play and rewards involved. I agree with PP that as an adult that's now just a feature/dialect but I would raise it if it was in written form.

My daughter does, because she struggles to make certain speech sounds

The school your childrens go to?

I’d feel perfectly comfortable, yes, especially if they were in danger of teaching children incorrectly.

I was perfectly comfortable telling the teacher (not TA) that made my (very) dyslexic DD spell the, correctly spelt, word ‘Repeatedly’, three times as ‘Repeatidly’. Why wouldn’t you?

This. I expect teachers to get SPAG right.

@ElefantAndCastle After I'd had my third child I worked for about 5 years as a TA before becoming a tutor.
I have two degrees and 20 plus years of experience as a primary teacher.
So I'd like to think I'm not "badly educated"?
What do you do for a living?

A HT I worked with used to say 'Nothink' instead of Nothing

Why would you not? Why entertain hypersensitivity to the feelings of people failing in their jobs - without concern for the consequences, for the people whose education is the purpose of those jobs?

You can deal with the feelings by speaking to her kindly, privately. You can address the substantive issue by speaking to her kindly, privately.

What on earth would prevent you from doing that? Other than a reasonable preference for going via the teacher or manager.

Either way this needs to he dealt with.

Please be careful correcting someone’s speech. I had to have hours and hours of speech therpy as a child and it took a long time for me to build my confidence.

There are certain words now I still struggle with and honestly if you pulled me up on it I would probably go home and cry. Then be extremely anxious to speak and I would avoid saying that word as much as possible.

Master's. Not master.

Badly educated? That’s rude. I used to be a TA, I’m degree educated. I was poorly paid but not uneducated.

I’d have marched into that classroom.

It's perception isn't it - they perceive the word to be spelt as they say it. They may even think "specific" is a different word entirely!

Angela Rayner famously twice said "fragrantly" instead of "flagrantly" during an interview presumably because her perception was that was the correct word.

And yes, I would correct errors like that - it's not just a spelling mistake it's a different word!

But she wouldn't spell it incorrectly I'm sure - she would know the word she was using and would write it correctly even if pronunciation is a problem.

Goodness gracious, the percussion teacher was dyslexic but a first rate percussionist nonetheless? Do go on…

Are you sure you were appointed resident pedant? Or were you just pegged as resident pedant and all round snobsworth jobsworth?

Good grief that's appalling!

Well done, You've researched how many teachers for this thorough analysis?

Presumably you've pulled up all of their records?

Oh bloody hell, it makes me wince when I see people on here using “would of”, I think I’d have had forty fits seeing this on my childs schoolwork.

Hope you complained 😂

Now now, that poster clearly knows better....they certainly think they do.

I worked together with a very xenophobic co-worker and she also said Pacific instead of specific. She also made other glaring errors when speaking English.

Can't help thinking that one reason why she was xenophobic was that she resented that all her foreign co-workers had a better grasp of English grammar than her.