* Note that there are deliberate spelling errors in this post

In the previous post we looked at problems with punctuation and how punctuation can make or brake a sentence.

The same can bee said for spelling. Spelling is a major stumbling point for students if all ages. But why is that?

For starters, English is a notoriously difficult language to learn, even for native speakers. While English usage has adapted to meet the needs of a modern society, English spelling is still rooted in antiquated language forms, so the weigh a word is pronounced isn’t necessarily reflected in the way that it is spelled, which creates unique spelling challenges for students.

But is correct spelling even that important? After all, spell-check programs abound, and online dictionaries our available at the click of a mouse.

Correct spelling might not even be that big of a deal considering that a study by English researchers found that letter order in spelling is not really that important. As long as the first and last letters are in the right place, the eye can unscramble the letters sew that the sentence can be understood.

Even with the abundance of spell-checkers and the eye’s ability to unscramble letters, spelling still poses a problem.

Teachers in England say that bad spelling occurs so frequently among first year university students that they are considering adopting a system where misspelled words are labeled as variant not wrong.

Digital communication is slowly replacing other forms of communications. We email and text message more than ever before. So, it should be know surprise that since children are the biggest users of online technology and since they communicate fluently in digital language, that they are the ones who have the most challenges using standard forms of English.

If online communication is the way of the future, and our eye can fix misspelled words, and there are programs to spell for us, why do we place such an emphasis on correct spelling?

For one thing, spell-check is never 100% reliable. There are no less than five mistakes in this post that spell-check did not catch.

As of this moment, technology isn’t everywhere. Students still need to have decent spelling skills to right exams or fill out job applications. Like it or not, people will make decisions about your intelligence based on how well you can spell.

In the classroom, poor spelling can ruin a well thought-out paragraph, causing the reader to fumble, halt, backtrack, and re-read, which can diminish from the overall meaning of the sentence. This is, of course, especially troublesome for students when that reader happens to be their teacher.

Until the time that spelling variants are accepted and online acronyms are accepted in more formal situations, students need to use whatever tools they can to help them remember how to spell words correctly.

We’ll look at some tips next time.

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Learning the proper uses for punctuation is challenging for people of all ages. After all, there is an almost infinite number of rules to remember and an almost equal number of exceptions to those rules.

One of the biggest punctuation culprits is the comma. And it’s little wonder when one respected grammar guide shows no less than 15 rules for using the comma correctly, and almost as many exceptions.

Commas appear where they are not needed, and are suspiciously absent where they are needed. Apostrophes pop up where they don’t belong. Semicolons are used in defiance of logic, hyphens erroneously appear in the place of dashes, and ellipses stretch out into infinity.

The discussion on the proper uses of punctuation is a hot topic not just regulated to the grammar section of the library. Non-fiction books on grammar have even been spotted on the best-seller list.

But it you are less than a grammar enthusiast, less than a word nerd, following a labyrinth of seemingly incomprehensible grammar Dos and Don’ts can actually detract from the writing process.

But isn’t punctuation supposed to make writing, and reading easier?

If punctuation causes so many difficulties for today’s students, is following a set of confusing rules necessary? If you are not a grammar enthusiast, being forced to follow complicated rules can do a number on a student’s motivation to learn.

Punctuation has a deeply rooted history and tends to follow a pattern of popularity. The semi-colon for instance has risen and fallen in popular usage. In France, the semi colon has even been the cause of political mischief.

While punctuation has always been debated, the debate doesn’t have a place in classroom. Students writing formal papers for school need to have, at minimum, a cursory understanding with the rules of punctuation.

In informal writings such as in emails, text messages, and instant messages, the rules can be a bit more lax. Of course, informal writing opens the door to informal spelling, but that’s an issue for another day.

We've included a few comma mistakes in this post. Can you spot them?

Remembering all the rules can be next to impossible. Even the best grammarians use a reference for time to time. Here are some grammar guides that we like:

• The Bedford Handbook by Diana Hacker, 7th edition
• The Little, Brown Handbook by Aaron and Fowler
• The Grammar Girl Website

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Rising gas prices change the school experience

For students, a new school year means adapting to new things—a new grade, new teachers, new classrooms, and new subjects. But this year, there could be one more thing to learn to deal with: the elimination of school fieldtrips.

Like peanut butter sandwiches in lunch bags, school fieldtrips are going the way of the dodo. However, the death of fieldtrips has nothing to do with food allergies or even with the safety of students. School boards across the US are considering banning—or have already banned—fieldtrips due to rising gas prices.

For most schools districts, a virtual fleet of yellow school buses are involved in transporting students to and from the classroom. Schools have a hard enough time coping with funding issues and budget problems without an even bigger portion of their meager budgets going to cover the cost of school buses for extracurricular fieldtrips.

Funding issues have already hit schools hard resulting in decreased numbers of teachers, lower salaries, and crowded classrooms. As well, athletics and extracurricular programs are getting the axe.

A survey of school boards by the American Association of School Administrators shows that ninety-nine percent of schools surveyed felt that rising gas prices had an impact on their school.

Some school boards are even considering switching to a four-day school week to help deal with the rising cost of fuel. A shorter school week would decrease fuel costs associated with transportation, heating and cooling, and energy consumption.

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Are wired classrooms changing the way that students learn?

Chalkboards, one room school houses, apples for the teacher, walking to school, using both sides of the paper, desks with flip open tops, writing with pencils right down to the nub…there is something in the air during back to school time that prompts nostalgic thoughts of academia.

All those images of schooldays persist as icons of academia, even though not a single one of the items in the list above is used in a modern classroom—they are nothing more than relics, quaint memories from educational history.

My, how education has changed! Now the chalkboard is nothing more than a relic of classrooms past. Today’s classrooms are wired, interactive, and media-rich. Gone are the chalkboards and the notebooks; in their places are digital displays and laptops.

But have these new technological teaching tools helped or hindered the way that kids learn in the classroom? Multi-media visual tools have certainly improved the scope of a teacher’s lesson preparation and delivery. Teachers can teach a lesson all while showing resources, three-dimensional mind maps, color images, video clips and every possible resource available to help drive home the message of the lesson. But, has technology in the classroom limited the scope of how far a student’s brain has to stretch to understand that lesson?

Is too much technology doing the hard work for students—the visualizing, the imagining? Is it making it so that students don’t have to rely on their brains to make the necessary connections? They don’t have to fill in the gaps or do the mental legwork to understand so that they can have the “A-Ha!” moments of true understanding. They don’t have to extend their mental capacities beyond what they see in front of them, because it was all there for them, all laid out in full-color and pretty pictures. Why remember the answer when you can just Google it?

Consider classrooms of the past: with little or no high tech tools, great thinkers made important intellectual leaps using nothing but brain power…no word processors to fill in words as they typed great dissertations, no spell check, no computers to help them fill in the gaps. If they could accomplish these tasks with no help, shouldn’t today’s students be able to as well?

The irony here is that chalkboards, in their day, actually revolutionized the classroom. They made it possible for the teacher to teach multiple students at once using visual aids. It was the first time teachers could write a message and have all students see it.

Chalkboards haven’t disappeared from classrooms just yet. They are still there at the front of many classrooms—sometimes hidden behind projector screens—a quaint reminder of the way things used to be.

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Oxford Learning students are helping children in Uganda tell malaria-infected mosquitoes to buzz off by raising funds for BUY-A-NET, a charitable organization that supplies bed netting and medicines to families in Africa.

BUY-A-NET is a volunteer organization based in Kingston, Ontario, Canada that provides World Health Organization (WHO) approved mosquito nets to families in Uganda. For many children in Africa, the basic comforts of life are a luxury. Millions of families live in such extreme conditions of poverty that they are unable to purchase to a simple bed net to prevent to prevent infected insects from biting.

Malaria is a life-threatening parasitic disease transmitted by mosquitoes. It kills an African child every 30 seconds. Those who don’t die form the illness can have lasting learning impairments. (WHO: Roll Back Malaria) Yet, Malaria is highly treatable and preventable.

Oxford Learning students have been raising funds for BUY-A-NET by participating in read-a-thons and other fundraisers such as art auctions.

So far Oxford Learning has provided the funds to purchase enough bedding nets to supply multiple villages!

If you would like to support BUY-A-NET with a donation, please visit BUY-A-NET’s website.

Oxford Learning students in Kingston, ON raise funds for
BUY-A-NET with an art action.

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