PSU Magazine Winter 1998

---·::~ . :'..,.- . ': ... :. ') ..... ...- s a fourth-grader in the mid-1960s, I was handed back a spelling test by my teacher, who asked that I go through all my misspelled words and correct them. The misspelled words outnumbered the correct ones by a wide margin. Who ~L~~i- i y-oV\ dy-esS oun_____ knows, maybe they were all wrong-I don't remember the score. What I do remember was that the words were so off the mark, so unintelligible, that I couldn't correct them. I didn't know what they were supposed to be. Spelling was my nemesis. I was a rotten speller through most of elemen– y-e. MC\ L n e_ol.-lldll'\'+ ~ in~e..r-.S \ eo.s+ c~.\-c.h tary school, and didn't really undergo a dramatic turnaround until I took journalism classes in college. There, correct spelling was sacred. Misspelling anything was unforgivable. Misspelling someone's name was grounds for flunking. I shaped up fast. I joined the ranks-an elite group, l've come to under– stand---of correct peller . It is an honor I am now trying to pas down to my third-grade son, who, on Fridays, brings home a weekly list of 15 word that he i to learn for a test the following week. Please understand that Ian is one smart kid. He was speaking in whole sentences at 18 months. He had The Night Before Christmas practically memorized by the time he was three. But with spelling, he's hit a wall. He gets the sounds right, but actual "correct" spellings elude him unless the word is a phonetic no-brainer. What's happened with my genius son? PHOTO BY STEVE DIPAOLA 10 PSU MAGAZINE WINTER 1998 Correct spelling is really no harder than brain surgery. By John Kirkland It was only when I spoke with Sandra Wilde, PSU associate professor of education, that I started to calm down. Wilde, a specialist in spelling and author of You Kan Red This!, claims that expectations for children to spell correctly are way too high, and the method of. presenting students as young as eight with 15 new words a week is unreasonable and counterpro– ductive. The road to correct spelling requires memorization, she explains, but it also involves getting a broad feel for the English language. That takes time, and while it's happening, children should be allowed to spell "creatively" as a way of feeling their way along. The problem, according to Wilde, is American society won't let you get away with being a creative speller. "The only areas where we're expected to be 100 percent in our ociety are spelling and brain surgery," she says. Spelling is used to screen job appli– cants even if the job itself requires no spelling. Poor pellers frequently think of themselves a uneducated, and they think that educated people-writers in particular-spell better than they really do. They don't realize that misspellings in published books and articles are corrected by a copy editor. ln fact a lot of notable people probably spell no better than my own third-grader. "Take a look at the journals of Meriwether Lewi -he had a lot of invented spelling ," Wilde says. Invented spelling is the starting point at which chools teach pelting, and Wilde is all for it. Give children a solid foundation in phonics, then give