Teacher, teach thyself
Our 4th-grader’s summer writing teacher — a UC Irvine professor — corrected the her misspelled “philosophocal” to instead read “philisophical.” Thanks, big improvement.
The teacher’s assistant then “corrected” a run-on sentence by adding a period in the middle, so that the second “sentence,” now a fragment, began with “but” and a comma — introducing multiple errors with a single change.
That was UC Irvine. The public schools are worse, though we live in a (purportedly) top district. Either we are misinformed on that point — quite possible — or the situation is still worse elsewhere.
There are at least two potential solutions. Teachers could learn to spell, or they could dispense with spelling entirely and rely on computer spellchecking. Either solution would be an improvement.
