Saturday, March 8, 2008

Spelling 'Erors'

I had some initial reservations about teaching. My spelling is for one thing, atrocious. My private school education taught me to 'spell things like I thought they were spelled' and unfortunately my spelling has never fully recovered. Teaching kids how to spell, well, it made me want to vomit. My mother provided me with the following story from her days as a teacher (now a preschool principal) that made me feel a whole lot better...

I was teaching English in Venezuela, first grade. One week I was grading their spelling tests and every test had spelled one of the words incorrectly. I though to myself, "every child spelled this word incorrectly? There must be something wrong." So I looked back at my lesson plans and low and behold I had spelled the word incorrectly on the board, and they had all copied this incorrect version. So I taught kids to spell this one word incorrectly, haven't you had a teacher who has marked something wrong on a paper? Making this one mistake was certainly not the end of my career.

She was right. One flaw is not going to be the end of my teaching career. I can't imagine a teacher who has never made a mistake. With so many children and parents to balance the field is all about learning by trial and error. Although to be on the safe side, I found some fun spelling games...

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