Japonica

I thought I'd post this and see if anyone else has stories from their kids' classrooms.

I've heard other parents talk about spelling woes and NAPLAN spelling scores.

Over this past school year, I've cast a wary eye around my daughter's PP/Y1 class. I bit my tongue at the teacher-created posters with "definate," "infinate," and "seperate."

They have a new teaching assistant who has been there the past couple of months, and I feel sorry for the students she gets down the road. She just made a labelled display of flowers on the wall. There are "rose pedal's," "daisy pedal's," "seed's" and "stem's."

I have to say something this afternoon. No wonder kids have issues with spelling if the people put in charge of educating them have no clue how to write properly.

HelenTD

I sympathise. We have the apostrophe disease at our school, too, as well as spelling mistakes. The Year 7 teacher sent home a note recently where she had typed up "payed". We had an email yesterday asking for contributions for a present for her.

Japonica

How about:

http://www.allenandunwin.com/default...=9781861976772

HelenTD

Very apt. I'll be sure to forward an anonymous suggestion to the mum making the collection (another teacher at the school).

jothefw

Mmmm - this troubles us too but it did in the UK too, to be fair.

My issue at the moment is that the spellings for the week list has capital letters and yet the children are to learn to spell them with lower case. It's not that hard to turn off the automatically capitalise option in Word is it???

My son isn't the most keen at school and this is a tiny thing that drives us both nuts at times!

We've had that many spelling mistakes in class newsletters that I've nearly stopped noticing which scares me even more

Wol

I think it's fairly common everywhere.

I read the London Telegraph online and the spelling and grammar can be pretty dire. The *printed* editions are not, so it's probably the case that what you read online is the "work in progress" - the articles as they are input by the journalists. The subs then correct everything for the printed editions.

It's sad: English for all its quirks and foibles is an incredibly evocative and interesting language and it's being mangled more and more.

(Many of those whose argument is that "language always changes" are basically just too lazy to write correctly, IMO. Hard hat on....)

Sally Redux

I wonder if they changed the rules so that using apostrophes for plurals was correct - would people start leaving them off?

iamthecreaturefromuranus

Shouldn't that have been "basically just too lazy to write correctly, in my opinion"

expatasia

I'd be mortified if I had a kid in school exposed to such sloppiness.

Just refer those in charge at the schools to the example of their dear Prime Minister:

"I am a complete apostrophe nut. The misplacement of commas. The modern need to put a comma before the word and in every sentence. What is going on with that? Dashes. Why does one need dashes in a properly constructed sentence? Sentences that start with and. An inability to work out how to use its and it's."

It gets worse. Working for Melbourne law firm Slater & Gordon she instituted a grammar chant. "I used to have them all chanting 'one cat's hat, two cats' hats.

Where do the apostrophes go?' "If I got a letter with it done wrong I would draw a cat with a hat at the bottom in the hope it would come back right the next time. They all thought I was kind of strange."

Wol

quoll

When you consider the scores required for entry into teacher training, it is hardly surprising to see it reflected in blackboard work a couple of years down the track. In my previous job I had to visit many classrooms in the course of a working week and could pretty much guarantee that there would be a need for a gentle word in at least one teacher's ear every time I ventured through a unit. It is embarrassing for the school when bloopers are published - especially in Canberra, the home of the public servant pedants.

However, even more embarrassing is the recently appointed Public Relations officer at my current workplace - quite frankly, she cannot write to save herself and refuses to get her work proof read before she sends out press releases (that is the cringe icon, isn't it?)

Japonica

Maybe that's what we need to do...

Burbage

If one considers that teachers are underpaid, constantly at risk of falling foul of disciplinary regulations and completely open to violence and false allegations from schoolchildren, it doth amaze me that there are any teachers at all never mind ones who can spell.

Dorothy

When we first arrived in Adelaide my daughter's year 7 S&E (basically geography/history) teacher kept calling her the American kid. She told him she was in fact Canadian and he argued with her that Canada was actually the same thing as America. It took my husband and I going to the school to sort him out. He honestly believed that they were like the UK where the two countries shared passports, medical care, etc. And this is the guy who was teaching them geography!

Sally Redux

That's a good point.