GalacticCactus Forum
Forums => English & Linguistics => Topic started by: pooka on October 09, 2009, 10:52:16 AM
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I was grading spelling tests at 4th grade today, and I was deeply disturbed by several of the bad results. I mean, my child only got 10 out of 20, so it was apparently a list of words the teacher was counting on the parents to make the kids study. But it was so much worse than than.
I hope the explanation is that there was a chain of 5 kids copying off each other, each one doing it a little less perfectly until you got to a point where only the first letter and general length of the word was right. It's kind of devastating to think someone can get to 4th grade and spell so poorly. I would guess 12/20 was about average, with a few outliers on either end. There were children who got 1 and 0 on this test. The words I can remember were:
Adjustment
idly (the most correctly spelled word)
lonely
solvable (I would have missed this)
preoccupied
envious
insist
decision
motorcycle
rearrange (probably the most misspelled word)
Treasure Island (my kid was one of a few kids who missed this because it was written on the wall... sigh)
latitude (I might have missed this)
longitude
courageous
And then there were three bonus words: immense, treacherous, and mischief. I'm not sure what made them bonus, but almost no one got them.
I couldn't really detect a theme to this spelling list, and maybe there wasn't one. Maybe my memory of how well one should be spelling in 4th grade is distorted. I graded the math papers and the performance was a lot closer to what I might expect. When I gave them back to the teacher I mentioned they were better than the spelling tests and the teacher said she didn't know why the kids were having such a hard time, worse than last year. I don't know. Maybe it's some unintended consequence of core curriculum education, whatever the heck that means.
I do recall that we had a separate textbook for spelling in 4th grade. I'll have to ask my child about that.
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I would have gotten those all right.
Where do I sign up to re-enroll in 4th grade?
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I don't remember my spelling lists in fourth grade, except I think the word cemetery was on one. I remember the mnemonic still: in a cemetery, you might say "Eee!"
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I have a distinct memory of learning how to spell "friend" in the third grade. I think my teacher's name was Mrs. Burke. I kinda had a crush on her.
Anyway, I learned it by pronouncing it in my head as "fry-end."
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Yup. I thought about it, and I was in a magnet program in 4th grade.
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I have a distinct memory of forgetting how to spell "of" in fourth grade for about 20 minutes. I'm pretty sure that's when I first realized I would get dementia one day
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And yet your recall of that event is most promising.
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Not at all. My grandma can still tell you stories about when she was three years old, and then turn around and call my mom to tell her that there is a strange man in her house who wont go away...turns out to be her husband of 40 years or so.
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I don't remember my spelling lists in fourth grade, except I think the word cemetery was on one. I remember the mnemonic still: in a cemetery, you might say "Eee!"
And I can still remember my mnemonic for spelling "analysis": If your sister tells you that she needs to go have a rectal analysis, you ask her, "Anal? Why sis?"
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That's awesome.
My friend mnemonic (again from fourth grade, which appears to be a particularly formative age for most of us) was "You can play with your friends on FRIday, which is the END of the week."
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I don't think I've ever used a mnemonic for a spelling word. (Other than the very generic "i before e except after c.")
This might have something to do with why I am such an extremely poor speller.
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:lol:
I have to think of a Keanu Reeves movie to spell "mnemonic" right.
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My second son posted this on his FB page today.
He reads a lot of fanfic and reviews for anime. He found this little gem. He does say that the writer of this piece is "mentally handicapped", so he is forgiving of it -- but wow! I'm amazed we could read it. Definitely so dyslexia issues with this writer. (either that, or it is a really good put-on act by someone)
Case of the Ordinary Shooting (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5467091/1/Case_of_the_Ordinary_Shooting)
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I smell a fake.
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As do I. The main thing that makes it hard to read is the addition of an e after each other vowel. Hardly a pattern I'd expect if the supposed provenance were true.
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They can spell "know" but not "murder". I think the writer tripped up there.
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Today I was correcting a short answer test on Robin Hood. Question 6 was "What was the sorrowful Minstrel's problem?" And the answer is that the woman he loved had an arranged marriage in order to keep her land. I accepted many variations on this, but the one that made me laugh out loud was "He smelled."
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:lol:
How did you end up grading this test?
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I marked it as missed. I'm not the teacher, so I try to be consistent. They had missed a lot of other questions, unfortunately.
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I wasn't clear. I assumed you marked that answer wrong!
What I was asking was how you got roped into this duty to start with.
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I volunteered to help out around the classroom on my day off, and what they could use help with was grading papers.
In other news I was helping my 6 year old spell nickel and we had to stop and circle the "digraph", she said.
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I don't think I've ever used a mnemonic for a spelling word. (Other than the very generic "i before e except after c.")
This might have something to do with why I am such an extremely poor speller.
Me too, and me too.
Where I went to school the kids were so poor, we couldn't afford mnemonic devices.
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We were so poor, we couldn't afford the silent m in mnemonic, much less the device!
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There was a hysterical answer on the Robinson Crusoe short answer. If I could only remember what it was. Oh. The question was why Robinson didn't return to Hull after his first disastrous voyage. The correct answer would be that he didn't want to return a failure after his parents had opposed him leaving in the first place. One kid wrote "because his body still wanted to be a sailor." I kind of have to wonder if there was some metaphor used in the text that gave rise to that answer.
So do you guys think it's pretentious to refer to bleu cheese? I tend to think of it as a convention of the culinary industry. Is there such thing as fromage bleu or do they have several dozen other names for it if you're actually in France?
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There are several dozen other names for it if you're actually in France. Like the Eskimos and snow. ;)
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But it seems as though they must have a term for the category when discussing which of the varieties is best, or weighing their various qualities.
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Hey! Turns out that "Bleu" is a term for the category. (Under "B" there is the category "Bleus" (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fromages_fran%C3%A7ais))
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Hmmm... however, Roquefort, which I thought was a Bleu, is listed on its own. Maybe the French definition of bleu is a lot narrower than we would think.
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That's just a way of grouping terms that start with the same word. Roquefort is a bleu cheese, but its name does not start with Bleu, so it isn't put under the Bleu alphabetical grouping.
But yes, bleu is a term for the type of cheese. I don't know how you'd generally refer to it in France, but "fromage bleu" does return a good number of hits on google.fr.
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Today as I was grading the spelling tests the teacher started quizzing the kids on presidents of the US, going up from first. I was transfixed by this. I should really learn them, anyway.
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*sings* "Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison Monroe and Adams....."
Of course, when I learned it, that song ended with "Bush makes 41 presidents"
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I was showing my children the Queen Elizabeth with presidents series and finally realized LBJ was missing.
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Wow pooka. Just... wow. ;)
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Today, I was doing some correcting for my Teacher Aid class. A seventh grader had written their name, and next to it put "apsint". :facepalm:
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Gotta give the student points for gumption.
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Word I hadn't seen before on this week's spelling list: Shambolic
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Shouldn't the rule be "i before e except after c or before silent g"? It's tough because chief looks like a meta-exception to most people but if you know phonetics, it isn't.
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Speaking of I before E, I recently had an argument with a player of a game I played today in the comments section, where he spelled "weird" wrong, he spelled it "wierd" and when I proceeded to correct him, he said "no, no, no, you have it wong it's wierd becawse I before E except after C how did you pass kindergarten?", then I replied "Can Others reply to this comment and agree with me that he spelled "weird" wrong?", then I saw the "5 others typing" text and I was like "Yes, this dude will get owned!" but then they say stuff like "No it's spelled "Wierd". Dude, learn basic engrish" and "You cannot violate a rule. It would be like breaking the law of gravity. It's spelled wierd whether you like it or not because I before E". I then facepalmed myself so hard I got a concussion. :grumble:
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Next time, post a link to a dictionary entry (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/weird). It's hard to argue with that.
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Hey, that's a good idea!
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"No it's spelled "Wierd". Dude, learn basic engrish" and "You cannot violate a rule. It would be like breaking the law of gravity. It's spelled wierd whether you like it or not because I before E".
Those both seem to me like sarcasm.
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Eh, perhaps they are, but it's still irritating as crap, and my mind registered them as actual stupidity, and it triggered an allergic reaction in me, thanks to my allergy to stupidity.
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Sometimes we leave subtitles on and I see movie lines I never really thought through before. Like in Lilo and Stitch, after Stitch flattens all the truck tires, the driver jumps out and says "What we went hit?" Where is that a thing? Well, Hawaii, apparently.