A restaurant that removed your favorite item from the menu, a bad cover of a great song…. write a post about something that should’ve been left untouched, but wasn’t. Why was the original better?
The first year I started teaching I was bothered by the fact that, majority of nine year old kids, could not spell even the very simple words. I wasn’t sure why that was the case.
I found every few minutes kids would raise their hand and ask, ‘Miss how do you spell’?
I found it quite annoying, that these children were unable to spell, I thought they just did not care.
In Language Arts, they had a speller, where there were exercises in spelling, phonetics, grammar, certain words that sound the same but mean different e.g, to, too, two, or there, their, they’re. To me if a child has this book as a guide, he/she can never have trouble spelling.
The book was introduced from grade one, you might think how can anyone have problem with spelling if they had such a valuable book.
May be I thought not much importance was given to this book or only the twenty words were given to the student to learn on Mondays and do the test on Fridays. The rest of the exercises were overlooked.
There were about five to seven students in my class who loved this book, the rest didn’t because they claimed it was too difficult. I know it was good for them and their claim was not valid.
Some parents complained they did not understand and could not help their kid. One parent called me at home, she said, she sat with her son every evening for more than an hour to learn the twenty words. I knew the parent although she was putting in the time, was not doing it right . I told her five to ten minutes was enough to let the child learn those words.
I find in our education system especially ones who are the decision makers, make their decision based on the number of parents who complain.
The end result was they took away the Speller, they made a lot of parents and children happy, but succeeded in producing students or even adults who cannot spell!!
k: https://sabethville.wordpress.com/2015/03/30/dp-daily-prompt-let-it-be/
Sabethville 