Spelling Terrors

I know I haven't posted in a while. Busy with life, I suppose. This morning, however, I stumbled across something that couldn't be ignored.

One of the writing sites (Romance Worth Killing For) I frequent was talking about spelling - Teaching Spelling Early - and how kids are encouraged to spell creatively (i.e. as long as they get the sounds right, they get points for spelling it right, like KAT instead of CAT). The author of the post was against it, so I'm not ranting about her. She pointed to another writing site's blog of the day: Red Ink (from the Avon Romance blog) where an editor talked about the use of red ink and some fool's idea that red ink damages the self-esteem of children. The author of this blog was also against the bad ideas, so I'm not ranting about her either. I think you can all see where I'm headed with my rant though.

Creative spelling? Red ink damages self esteem? What in the...?

Okay. Let's start with the first bad idea. As you may know, my daughter was subjected to public school for most of the first 6 grades. Her spelling truly sucked. She spent a lot of time word-guessing (because that's what she'd been taught) and she wasn't very good at it. Oh, sure, she'd get close, but as my father always said "Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades." When you're reading a story and you see the word CONCEIVE and guess that it's the word CONCAVE, you're going to be really confused. Reading is going to suck for you, because no story ever makes sense. TALK becomes TAKE; JURY becomes JERRY... You get the picture. And heaven forbid you get to the age of 16 still guess-reading and take chemistry. Try to guess what those element names might be mistaken for, and you'll blow up the lab.

As to the second bad idea - the idea that pointing out a child's mistakes makes them feel bad about themselves. PLEASE please stop this thinking. Follow it's logical conclusion for just one second. If you never point out a child's mistakes because you don't want to hurt their feelings then they will never learn to do anything. (Or the best you can hope for is a little automaton who only knows what he's memorized.) Learning comes from making mistakes and trying to correct them. I was discussing this with my daughter this morning. Her beginning years of schooling were taught with this in mind. K-2nd, she was taught that no matter what she did, she was going to get an A. As long as she was quiet and breathing in-and-out, she was a success.

Ya right.

So, my daughter learned early she never needed to work for anything. NEVER. "The kat iz bloo." was a perfect sentence and deserving of an A. (After all she tried to spell the words right, didn't she? And we wouldn't want to crush her self-esteem, would we?) Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn't work that way. Sometimes we make mistakes, we learn from them, we work to fix them, and we grow from the experience. That's the way the real world works.

I've spent YEARS undoing the damage those teachers, and their touchy-feely, everything-is-cotton-candy philosophy of teaching.

Pull out the red pens, folks! Turn them into a tool for learning! Teach your children to accept their mistakes and learn from them. Teach them to find the errors and fix them. Teach them ignorance is not something to be ashamed of, but something to overcome.

If you don't, they really will grow up stupid, and when you think about it, how damaging to their self-esteem will that be?