Spell check, or check out?

At the risk of this turning into a rant, I feel compelled to talk about the craft of writing and the slippery slope that today’s school children – at least in my community – find themselves careening down (rather than scaling successfully).

In my community, the prevailing wisdom (and I use that phrase very loosely) seems to be that spell-check is the great solution to all that ails the beleaguered education system, a system that apparently doesn’t have the time, will, leadership, or vision to put basic communication skills high enough on the list of “basics” that our children need to learn in elementary school.

For my son, an incoming seventh grader, his last spelling drilling took place in 3rd or 4th grade – around the same time he had his last instruction in cursive writing – though that’s a subject for a separate rant, er, I mean, blog entry. Anyhow, since then, there has been sporadic spelling work, though it’s usually wrapped into vocabulary homework for social studies, meaning that the meaning of the word is more important than the spelling thereof. In 4th grade, there was a little of this and that for spelling, grammar, and handwriting, but certainly how words were spelled was not a priority. And in 5th grade, where written homework increased both in quantity and required quality of expression, the fact that spelling mistakes occurred just wasn’t that big of a deal. My son’s teacher – a wise but career-end-stage teacher – said, quite frankly and on more than one occasion, that since kids mostly use computers to do their homework, spell-check will take care of most of their spelling mistakes. There was simple no acknowledgment that whether the child could actually spell correctly without spell-check was or should be a point of concern.

So far, I’ve only dealt with spelling…grammar is yet another sad story. Other than a glancing blow past the concept of outlining (yes, the classic subject-predicate-dangling-modifiers graphic scheme of olde), there was absolutely no attention paid during class time to whether kids used necessary nouns and verbs, proper punctuation, correct capitalization, sensible sentence structure, or anything else. The language arts/social studies teacher seemed more concerned with covering the requisite course material than making sure the kids could communicate their knowledge.

And – in one of those mixed-up bits of edu-think these days – the teacher followed a strand of prevailing thought about “reaching all learners” by requiring the students to do posters and drawings and storyboards for some of their assignments – and grading the students on the quality of their projects. What the heck ever happened to putting words on paper to demonstrate one’s knowledge? Or giving a speech in front of the class? And what consideration or accommodation is given to kids who are crummy artists, or can’t translate fact-based content into sketches and pretty colors? No knock to the kids who actually can draw better than write…but for the kids who find drawing a struggle, or an unsatisfying way to communicate, they become double losers – penalized in their learning process and their grades by having to draw a picture rather then put into words what they learned about, say, the trading/commercial practices of ancient Africa. And note, this doesn’t even begin to approach the question of why the kids aren’t learning to express themselves via 21st-century tools such as websites, blogs, wikis, Nings, PowerPoint, podcasts, and video as opposed to antique approaches like drawing with freakin’ colored pencils! (Check out Vicki Davis' Cool Cat Teacher blog and some of my other ed-blog links for a glimpse at the possibilities.)

Where does all this lead? In the near term, it presents a class of seventh graders who are entering a new school term woefully unprepared to perform at the level or writing quality that their teachers will expect – thus dragging down the learning process. It means our kids are being taught using old-school methods when the world is moving to Web 2.0 and beyond. And in the longer term it points to kids who are going to struggle in high school if they somehow don’t learn writing and spelling and note-taking skills ASAP. (Did you hear the rumor about the Brookline high schoolers who can’t read the blackboard when the teachers write in cursive?)

As a parent, it leave me angry for my son, livid as a taxpayer, frustrated as an editor who spends his days covering 21st-century education gains, and disheartened as someone who simply cares about our nation’s role and standing in the future. Do I think it’s all a lost cause for my kid? No. My son is a smart boy who will pull it together in his own time. But, man oh man, I don’t like what it says about my local school district and it’s ed policies.