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Out of the Mouths of Students
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I really enjoy walking the halls of any of our schools. You never know what will be on a bulletin board or wall. Roosevelt had this sign on the wall recently.
I, too, like spell check. My point, though, was that these kids are thinking and that's more important to me than spelling.
Anonymous said…
AAACK. This is high school. Poor spelling is poor spelling. There just isn't any excuse for not picking up a dictionary or using the phone in your pocket. The mentality of spelling not being important may be fine for emerging writers, but at a certain point you lose credibility when you can't spell common words properly. Spell check doesn't work when you're putting pen to paper. My child's LA teacher has the same attitude and has a poor mastery of standard English conventions, on top of having spelling errors in many of his handouts. The LA teacher! It's awful. How confident would you be in the teacher's ability to advance student skills?
-rant over
Anonymous said…
Source of the copied MLK Jr. quote, for those interested:
"Love in Action" http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/Vol06Scans/July1962-March1963DraftofChapterIV,LoveinAction.pdf
While I appreciate the sentiment, I have to agree that spelling matters. The message, while very important, loses much of its power because of the misspelling. I spent over 20 years in the "real world" before I became a teacher and one of the first lessons I learned is that the details matter. I think this is a message that does not get emphasized enough to our students. I will say that the IB program takes the details seriously and that can be an eye-opening experience to many of our students.
When kids read, they learn whether a word looks right or not, and they learn enough to know if they should look up a word to check the spelling.
Has nothing to do with being Sped or ELL, if you want your message not to be diluted, you consider the presentation.
By mentioning spellcheck, I was trying to humorously draw attention to the fact that years of emphasizing technology in the classroom, has apparently impeded student ability to produce without it.
Anonymous said…
Jet City mom, (I assume) you know nothing about this student and you are commenting on a public forum about their spelling. I might have done this 10 years ago too. But now that I have a dyslexic child, I can tell you that many very bright children have to work incredibly hard to learn to spell well. It can take into their 20's. Because 15% of children are dyslexic (and please understand that dyslexia occurs across the intelligence spectrum) it is very possible that this kid has put in hundreds of hours to get where they are. Judging a kid's spelling is a crummy thing to do- especially when it's a single letter of a pretty commonly misspelled word. Please consider learning more about dyslexia if you are concerned about good spelling and apt to comment about it for all to see and hear.
Teach Everyone
Anonymous said…
I was walking thru the hall the other day and the darn mushroom drawing had some grass growing next to the mushroom. It was a stinkhorn mushroom and drawn well but the grass was not realistic enough, didn't really look like grass. But their just kids and not spelling a word these days is not a big deal. The kids have a much,, much bigger vocabulary in this age of online dictionaries and pronunciation; spelling is done by computers now.
It's 2016.
It's about ideas, content, action - getting stuff done.
red pepper
Anonymous said…
Thanks for your comment raising awareness about dyslexia, Teach Everyone. I also have a child who is dyslexic and with that has come more sensitivity and understanding regarding misspellings. Kids in SPS who are dyslexic work extremely hard on their reading and spelling with very little support from the district, which has only a handful of teachers who have received training in a reading/spelling program designed for dyslexic learners (e.g. an Orton-Gillingham or linguistics-based program, such as Wired for Reading).
The speaker list is up for the Board meeting tomorrow; not as packed as I thought with just four people on the waitlist. The majority of the speakers are speaking on high school boundaries (with several wanting to talk about Ballard High). There are only three of us speaking about the Green Dot resolution asking the City to not grant the zoning departures that Green Dot has requested. It's me, long-time watchdog, Chris Jackins, and the head of the Washington State Charter Schools Association, Patrick D'Amelio. (I knew Mr. D'Amelio when he headed the Alliance for Education and Big Brothers and Big Sisters; he's a stand-up guy.)
Update 2: an absolutely fabulous interactive map made by parent Beth Day (@thebethocracy on Twitter - she covers Board meetings and is fun to read). end of update Update 1: Mea culpa, I did indeed get Decatur and Thornton Creek mixed up. Thanks to all for the correction. end of update I suspect some who read this post will be irate. Why do this? Because the district seems very hellbent on this effort with no oversight skid marks from the Board. To clearly state - I do not believe that closing 20 schools is a good idea. I think they hit on 20 because they thought it might bring in the most savings. But the jury is still out on the savings because the district has not shown its work nor its data. I suspect closing schools and THEN leasing/renting them is the big plan but that means the district really has to keep the buildings up. But this district, with its happy talk about "well-resourced schools" is NOT acknowledging the pain and yes, grief, that is to come fro
Update 2: So I have seen a message from President Liza Rankin on why she, Director Evan Briggs, and Director Michelle Sarju backed out of this meeting. In a nutshell: - She says there was no organization to the meeting which is just not true. They had a moderator lined up and naturally the board members could have set parameters for what to discuss, length of meeting, etc. All that was fleshed out. - She also claimed that if the meeting was PTA sponsored, they needed to have liability insurance to use the school space. Hello? PTAs use school space all the time and know they have to have this insurance. - She seems to be worried about the Open Public Meetings law. Look, if she has a meeting in a school building on a non-personnel topic, it should be an open meeting. It appears that Rankin is trying, over and over, to narrow the window of access that parents have to Board members. She even says in her message - "...with decisions made in public." Hmmm - She also says that th
Comments
-rant over
"Love in Action"
http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/Vol06Scans/July1962-March1963DraftofChapterIV,LoveinAction.pdf
It's worth a read.
-rant over
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/education/school-social-media-director-fired-after-correcting-student-misspelled-tweet/OwJNIAOukidyaXHoZqnkpO/
School social media director fired after correcting student's misspelled tweet
-McClureWatcher
C'mon, people.
french fry
When kids read, they learn whether a word looks right or not, and they learn enough to know if they should look up a word to check the spelling.
Has nothing to do with being Sped or ELL, if you want your message not to be diluted, you consider the presentation.
By mentioning spellcheck, I was trying to humorously draw attention to the fact that years of emphasizing technology in the classroom, has apparently impeded student ability to produce without it.
(I assume) you know nothing about this student and you are commenting on a public forum about their spelling. I might have done this 10 years ago too. But now that I have a dyslexic child, I can tell you that many very bright children have to work incredibly hard to learn to spell well. It can take into their 20's. Because 15% of children are dyslexic (and please understand that dyslexia occurs across the intelligence spectrum) it is very possible that this kid has put in hundreds of hours to get where they are. Judging a kid's spelling is a crummy thing to do- especially when it's a single letter of a pretty commonly misspelled word. Please consider learning more about dyslexia if you are concerned about good spelling and apt to comment about it for all to see and hear.
Teach Everyone
It's 2016.
It's about ideas, content, action - getting stuff done.
red pepper
http://wiredforreading.com/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/DyslexiaSupportWashingtonState/
- Sea Mom