Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Wow. My oldest's elementary school principal said that very thing....back in the early1990s. That group of kids went on to spell phonetically and once they reached middle school, they could barely write. We took our kids out of our (supposedly highly ranked) public school system after that and sent them to parochial schools.
But word study is NOT phonetic spelling. It is just explicitly teaching the spelling patterns to groups of children at a certain spelling level, instead of teaching one list of somewhat random words at a time to everyone. There are still lists and tests, and it IS phonics. It's just not called phonics. And it's got a bit of self directed learning in it compared to traditional phonics.
Location: Chapel Hill, NC, formerly NoVA and Phila
9,775 posts, read 15,776,851 times
Reputation: 10880
We've been in two "very good" school districts. In both, my kids have been taught spelling and have spelling lists and spelling tests. Interestingly enough, one of those districts is the same as tgbwc upthread who said his school doesn't teach spelling the traditional way. So it can vary within districts and possibly within schools.
Your experience is typical in public schools. I have been around this same block and come to find that others have too. Principals talk out of their blanks sometimes. He just means they don't teach spelling in isolation. However, his attitude and your experience are typical of public schools today. I too have asked if my child can do independent learning, and was shut down. I asked if he could go ahead in math and was shut down. I asked if he could read more books and the teacher wouldn't let him read more in class. And yes this is an "excellent" school district with a "gifted program" that was minimal and just a check-the-box-we-offer-it program. And yep, the kids do plateau when they're not challenged. I've come to live with the whole thing and learn how to supplement on the side (which I resent because like other kids, I want mine to have free time and play sports). It really is our public education system...all about teaching to the tests and priorities...
This is my first year homeschooling my 3rd grader. (actually online school)
She can't spell anything...she had a science lab today and she had to spell weeds, grass, dirt, leaves, and rocks. She spelled rocks correctly, the rest were just guesses based on the sound of the words. She got an A in language arts last year.
My older daughter went to a different school for k-2 and she learned how to spell. I don't know how my younger daughter passed second grade, she can't spell simple words that her big sister had to spell to get out of kindergarten. But when I talked to the teachers, they always said she was doing well, and she got good grades.
Now I have to find a way to get my daughter caught up.
Anyhow, I applaud your decision to homeschool. I'm sure your son will learn a lot more, and spelling is really important.
Seriously though, there is some truth in the principles statement; we're increasingly a purely digitally based writing system.
I really can't for the life of me remember handwriting anything in my college days or in my career. Everything used word processing programs or had some type of de facto spell check running in the background.
Even this post caught my (unintentional) typos/spelling errors.
Not only did spellcheck not catch "principle" for "principal," it didn't correct your grammar. "We're increasingly a purely digitally based writing system" is quite a garbled sentence. "We" are not a writing system. We are people. We *use* a writing system. Go back to Momzuki's home school.
Not only did spellcheck not catch "principle" for "principal," it didn't correct your grammar. "We're increasingly a purely digitally based writing system" is quite a garbled sentence. "We" are not a writing system. We are people. We *use* a writing system. Go back to Momzuki's home school.
This reminds me of a time when I was on a temp assignment for a company that designed word processors, testing the instruction manual for a new machine they were developing to see if the manual said what they thought it did. This machine had a brand new concept that the developers just knew we were going to love - it was spellcheck! We weren't impressed, and they wondered why. So we gave them a demonstration.
We had them give us a page to type, and did so as fast as possible, not making any deliberate typos but pushing our top typing speed so that there would be some. Then we scanned the typed pages and told them what typos we found, starting simultaneously with starting spellcheck on the machine. All five of us handed them a list of the errors we found, BEFORE the spellcheck program gave results, and we found osme it didn't. This was only possible because we knew how to spell, because we had learned in school.
My husband once had a customer who would come in often who was an older gentleman educated in England. They had a running competition going. When the gentleman would pick up his work (it was a printing company), the bill would sometimes be complicated due to multiple jobs of different runs, some having been bound, some not, some one-sided, some two-sided. My husband, who was very fast at this, would figure the bill with the calculator. The gentleman would do it in his head. The gentleman ALWAYS got the correct answer before the calculator did, because he was taught in school how to do math and how to do it accurately in his head.
Turning our brains over to machines is a mistake. The machines should be the tools of our brain, not the crutches.
Not only did spellcheck not catch "principle" for "principal," it didn't correct your grammar. "We're increasingly a purely digitally based writing system" is quite a garbled sentence. "We" are not a writing system. We are people. We *use* a writing system. Go back to Momzuki's home school.
And yet...my words still conveyed their intended meaning, and thus were communicated effectively.
Thanks for proving my point.
In fakt u kan spehl prutty mucch howevahr u wunt and stil b undurstoud.
Go figure.
Last edited by toobusytoday; 09-06-2013 at 07:12 AM..
Reason: removed rude sentence. We do not call people nazi anything on this forum
And yet...my words still conveyed their intended meaning, and thus were communicated effectively.
Thanks for proving my point.
In fakt u kan spehl prutty mucch howevahr u wunt and stil b undurstoud.
Go figure.
You are right that you still got your message across but for those of us that read your post, we were cringing at the misspellings and grammatical errors. In fact, I was about to correct your incorrect spelling of Principal but then I read the comment below where another poster pointed it out and I thought their comment made the point better then my fixing it. Proper spelling and good grammar just makes for easier reading. When someone writes something incorrectly, you need to read and re-read what they wrote for it to make sense.
And yet...my words still conveyed their intended meaning, and thus were communicated effectively.
Thanks for proving my point.
In fakt u kan spehl prutty mucch howevahr u wunt and stil b undurstoud.
Go figure.
That's the mediocrity that schools are teaching.
We should not settle for that.
Other countries don't and in this global economy the US will be left behind.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
