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.

Weighted and weighed are two different words used in two different ways though. "The baby weighed 6lbs" " The evidence was weighted in her favour."

Cheese & chuckney 😂

I think pacific is forgivable - some people just seem to have difficulty getting specific out

I am a TA in a primary school. I have two degrees, but I'm a carer, so had to step away from my career and find a job that fitted in with the demands of caring. This is not unusual; quite a few of our TAs are well educated.
The class teacher makes glaring errors in SPAG - including once telling the class that "laugh" was a verb in the phrase "a menacing laugh" - and I have to bite my tongue as she is very sensitive to correction.
I would want to be told if I had made similar errors.

I can’t agree that it’s dialect. It’s merely incorrect, uneducated English, and ought not to be acceptable in a classroom.

Yes I know, I dont need it explained to me.

I see 'I weighted myself', all the time on here.

Seriously? So most of our population is uneducated then? All the children in school who gain GCSEs are uneducated? If having GCSEs is uneducated why are we even bothering to send our kids to school at all if their education leaves them uneducated.

or is this just your way of saying 'look at me I'm so educated'. Bore off

Do you say "pecial" instead of "special"?

I used to correct my teachers’ work 😬. And argue back when they argued with me 😎

😮No way!

I seen instead of I saw, really gets to me

Forgivable to find it hard to pronounce and mess up in conversation sometimes. Not forgivable to be teaching children that the s in specific isn’t there!

Errors ought to be pointed out. As other posters have said, the needs of the pupils come first.

Unfortunately a lot of people (including some teachers) not only make spelling and grammar errors but don't care about getting it right or not. The head teacher at my kids' primary school used to send out a weekly newsletter littered with errors such as "here here" instead of "hear hear" and "dates for your dairies" etc. I assumed that she dictated it and it was typed and sent by the school secretary whose first language wasn't English. However when I politely suggested HT should proofread it before it went out, she not only confirmed she typed it herself but that she was furious to be pulled up. Nothing changed.

One of my relatives is a teacher at a private school and her grasp of spelling and grammar is terrible. Her own wedding invitation had three errors in it including e.g. "St Jame's Church". If she was teaching her students like that I'm surprised the parents didn't ask for their money back.

It doesn't mean people are badly educated or stupid. They just don't care.

Not maybe 100% on topic but this brings back a pacific (ha got you there) memory from third year juniors. I loved reading and writing stories and we wrote quite a few in class. One of them involved a character that I'd made up and I wrote his dialogue in his regional (local to us) accent and dialect. It came back covered in red pen where the teacher had meticulously corrected it all to the queen's English, destroying the essence of the character in the process. "Would you please buy me some lunch" does not have the same vibe as "gerrus summat from t'snap wagon" 😂

My daughter got told off when she corrected something a TA said when she was in year 1 or 2

At my primary school there was a girl in our class who had a French mum and spoke French fluently. In our French lesson the teacher taught us fruit and vegetable words for a test. It turned out that she told us the French word for "lettuce" was in fact the word for "salad".

On Friday we had the test and half French girl put the correct word for "lettuce". The teacher queried it and she explained. The teacher went ballistic ranting that she should have put the (incorrect) word taught, who did she think she was, how dare she be so rude. Whilst we all sat there thinking our teacher was making a massive fool of herself getting angry about being wrong, thereby drawing more attention to the fact that she was wrong. It would have been much better to say thanks for bringing that to my attention and explained the two words and their slightly different meanings to the class.

That was a private school too.

I correct them every single time. There’s no excuse for sloppy grammar in a school.

@honeylulu I think it’s a bit of both. It’s under educated in spelling and grammar! That they don’t care about it is a personality shortcoming. Not what I want to see in a teacher. Very poor attitude and does no one have spell check if it’s written English? I wonder if they would write “pacific” and not “specific”? Surely some common sense should be evident?