# Is this wrong or is it me? (Elementary school related) **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [September 22, 2010, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677 "2010-09-22T18:35:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Freudian\_Slit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@Freudian\_Slit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freudian_Slit)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2010, 11:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/21 "2010-09-22T23:52:39Z")
> [@Swallowed\_My\_Cellphone](#): > > :: sigh :: > > And then you find yourself in my job where genuinely intelligent people are crippled by the fact that they have such poor spelling and grammar, they are unable to communicate their brilliant ideas clearly to other people. Well, I think it’s important but I just don’t know that spelling tests all the time are the way to make sure kids learn to spell. You can learn to spell for the test but the words will have no meaning for you if you aren’t using them, which is why I think that there are other ways of encouraging proper spelling. Encouraging kids to read is key, IMO. ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/22 "2010-09-23T01:49:08Z")
> [@JFLuvly](#): > > Apparently the teachers are not allowed to give spelling tests any more. I teach 7th grade and give a spelling quiz weekly, so some of us still can. I give the kids all the lists for the whole year right up front and make spelling competitions and stuff out of it. So, we still do it. ---
**Author:** ![Pai325](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c68b51/32.png) [@Pai325](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pai325)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/23 "2010-09-23T02:21:09Z")
Our principal told us we couldn’t give spelling tests. She said her husband used Spell-check so our students could, too. I teach junior high. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/24 "2010-09-23T02:35:15Z")
> [@JFLuvly](#): > > Apparently the teachers are not allowed to give spelling tests any more. My daughter said they are given the words and they ask the person next to them to spell it and they mark each others work. I will try to get to the bottom of this later this week. Pretty soon all you will need is a babysitter course to be a teacher. See, this is where you’re wrong. There are absolutely bad teachers out there, but there is also a shit-ton of research being done these days into how children acquire literacy skills. If this is a province-wide policy, then someone in charge has almost certainly been reading some research that suggests an alternate approach to teaching this literacy skill will be more effective. They might be wrong. But for you to think you know better than the Department of Education– **before you’ve found out their rationale** –is pretty silly. Find out what’s being done instead, and then make snarky comments about babysitting. If what they’re doing instead involves tracking each child’s use of various phonemes, for example, I can tell you from experience that that’s significantly harder than just sending home a canned spelling list. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/25 "2010-09-23T02:40:04Z")
> [@Pai325](#): > > Our principal told us we couldn’t give spelling tests. She said her husband used Spell-check so our students could, too. I teach junior high. Naturally, given the availability of calculators, you are also barred from teaching arithmetic. ---
**Author:** ![Pai325](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c68b51/32.png) [@Pai325](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pai325)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/26 "2010-09-23T04:00:02Z")
> [@spark240](#): > > > [@Pai325](#): > > > > Our principal told us we couldn’t give spelling tests. She said her husband used Spell-check so our students could, too. I teach junior high. > > Naturally, given the availability of calculators, you are also barred from teaching arithmetic. I think she would have liked that, too, but she left. ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 4:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/27 "2010-09-23T04:20:42Z")
Hukt on fonix rily wurkt fur me! ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 10:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/28 "2010-09-23T10:24:46Z")
Excuse the foreigner, what are word lists? Words that you had to learn how to spell by rote, without a context? Because if it’s that, it seems a pretty silly mechanism; learning things in context tends to work a lot better, and maybe that’s what’s being done (as several other posters have already mentioned). ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 10:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/29 "2010-09-23T10:55:36Z")
> [@Chessic\_Sense](#): > > Seventh grade spelling, however, is a different story. We had much harder words like “faux pas” and “judgment” (tricky, tricky). They were themed with things like “words that spelled with an i in the middle where it might sound like an a” or “foreign words that aren’t spelled anything like you’d think”. THOSE classes actually taught me something…things I remember to this day. I still remember the spelling test in first form (=seventh grade) where the teacher gave us “guerilla”. She clarified “not the animal” but I still had no clue whatsoever what she was on about. So I definitely learned something that day! ---
**Author:** ![Dangerosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/30 "2010-09-23T12:16:47Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > Excuse the foreigner, what are word lists? Words that you had to learn how to spell by rote, without a context? Because if it’s that, it seems a pretty silly mechanism; learning things in context tends to work a lot better, and maybe that’s what’s being done (as several other posters have already mentioned). Depends on how its being taught, but usually, you have to know the word - spelling, definition and being able to use it in a sentence. As you probably know, English isn’t the most spellable language - so there is a lot of rote memorization, but because we have a lot of spelled different homonyms, context is essential, two. My kids are on and off on spelling testing depending on the teacher. The shame will be that someone will throw spelling tests at them later - they’ll move provinces or the department will change their minds, and spelling is a building skill. My son is getting word roots as well as spelling in sixth grade. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/31 "2010-09-23T12:53:04Z")
I was always the kid who never studied for spelling tests. Rote memorization always seemed stupid to me. If there were words I was unsure how to spell, I learned them during the definitions and sentences required. That said, I always did poorly on Spelling bees, because I would reach the end of the words I knew (not to mention getting nervous and having my mind go blank.) ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/32 "2010-09-23T13:30:16Z")
> [@Dangerosa](#): > > As you probably know, English isn’t the most spellable language - so there is a lot of rote memorization, but because we have a lot of spelled different homonyms, context is essential, two. Underlines mine; yes I’ve noticed, a common complaint among some brands of foreigners is that “learning English is like learning two different languages, spoken and written”; was that second underlined part intended as an example? 🙂 And thanks. The closest thing we did was sort of the opposite, where we would be reading a text supposed to be a bit above our level and had to look up and provide the definitions of some of the new words in it (sometimes the words we had to look up would be listed, sometimes the teacher would tell us to “pick five words from the text and provide the dictionary definition”). But Spanish spelling is much more straightforward, specially for some dialects including mine; the exercises were more intended to teach us dictionary usage than spelling. ---
**Author:** ![limegreen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/82dd89/32.png) [@limegreen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/limegreen)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/33 "2010-09-23T19:51:03Z")
Junior high teacher here, and I do spelling tests with my sixth and eighth graders, with my freshman class I do SAT vocabulary, which focuses more on knowing the general meaning of the word. And spell check doesn’t catch everything. Yew no what I mean? ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/34 "2010-09-23T23:24:07Z")
> [@MsWhatsit](#): > > > [@JFLuvly](#): > > > > These rules are generated by the Department of Education which would mean that a similar memo would have been sent home **province-wide.** > > Bolding mine. It might have been helpful to mention that you were in Canada in your earlier posts. 🙂 S/he did: “My daughter who is in **grade three** this year…” ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677/35 "2010-09-23T23:28:29Z")
> [@spark240](#): > > > [@Pai325](#): > > > > Our principal told us we couldn’t give spelling tests. She said her husband used Spell-check so our students could, too. I teach junior high. > > Naturally, given the availability of calculators, you are also barred from teaching arithmetic. Certainly, the availability of calculators should change the priorities and goals we have in teaching arithmetic. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-wrong-or-is-it-me-elementary-school-related/554677.md?page=1)