CATS wrote:
Just yesterday the 11yo from next door brought me an "essay"
he had written to show me his ribbon for best in class.

It was only two small pages of large writing of course, but
the teacher had not corrected a single spelling or grammar
mistake! I'm not talking about dangling participles here -
I mean there was almost no punctuation and any word over two
syllables was phonetically spelled out (and not well at
that!). Now this child loves to read, and when I questioned
him he said he thought some of his writing was "wrong" but
that the teacher didn't care as long as it was at least two
pages.

This boy goes to secondary school next year, and from what I
have observed there is no effort there to correct writing
standards either. One girl I tutored had her work corrected
when she was right and the teacher was wrong! I wanted to
write to the school but as I am not a parent there the girl
asked me not to as she didn't want the teacher getting mad
at her. What hope have we of producing literate students
with attitudes like that, and when even school report cards
come home with errors?



DD has never had any difficulty with spelling, but when she was about 8
she had leisure corrected as leasure! She had to write it out three
times at the bottom of the page, and much to her disgust it was a new
book and the first page is always special. Again it was a rather
vindictive teacher, the school year was coming to an end and she decided
it was a lesson in keeping quiet and not rocking the boat. She can still
spell leisure properly, and whenever she saw the teacher (who lived near
us) you could hear "can't spell leisure" said under her breath.

Both children always had a list of spellings to learn during the week
with a test on Monday morning, but DS always had to work hard on his.
The family still uses his mind-joggers as 'family words' e.g. boAt,
parliAment.


--
Sally at the Seaside ~~~~~~~~~~ (uk)
http://community.webshots.com/user/sallyswin