S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G

I've talked about math before, and also writing, but I haven’t yet brought up a subject that’s pretty much dropped after fifth grade: spelling. Sure, spelling counts in essays, but there are no more spelling stations with sand and colored gel, coming up with sentences with spelling words, or weekly spelling tests. Instead, there’s spell chekc.

I’m not a horrible speller, but I’m not a fantastic speller either. Though if you can sound it out, I can spell it. (Just so you know, coliseum cannot be sounded out. It was the word I got wrong in the fifth grade spelling bee, which, to be honest, I probably entered to get the medal for participation. I still can’t spell coliseum.)

I’m also not that lazy, but in fifth grade, when some of us who were doing well on the regular spelling tests got to pick our own words from a list of spelling bee practice words, I didn't waste the opportunity. Some people went through the packet and picked the shortest words they could find, but I went a different route. Since one of our weekly spelling assignments was to alphabetize our spelling list, I went through the packet and picked one word from each letter until I had enough words. I may have even gone so far as to pick words from similar categories so that when we made sentences with our words, I could jam five or six words into each sentence. At one point, my teacher asked me to stop doing that . . . so I only put four words in each sentence.

Spelling would then disappear from the language arts (LA) and reading curriculum until my eighth grade year. My LA/reading teacher had several interesting practices, including team dictionary races to find vocabulary words and a weekly spelling pretest.

My other spelling story doesn't have to do with the spelling tests, but with the rule that all essays first term had to be handwritten. This rule gave me all the opportunities I needed to disregard my least favorite spelling rule. I do just want to say, though, that I don’t think it can be called a rule anymore when it goes like this:

I before E except after C or when sounding like A, as in neighbor and weigh; or in weird, because weird’s a weird word; or in f words like foreign, forfeit, and freight; or in the number eight; or in science when you need to spell seismic, reindeer, or protein; or . . .