Abc's

As I head into my second year of teaching, I feel like I need to get a weight off my chest. For years, I've paraded around with this sense of superiority for knowing the correct use of a semicolon and the difference a hyphen makes in the word pompom (one is a weapon, the other is a fluffy symbol of school spirit).

But I can't spell to save my life.

Part of me blames this on growing up in the technology age. Even though we didn't get a home computer until I was in middle school, I wasn't exactly using complex compound words in my riveting* 5th grade report on the Stout-Hearted Seven. After that, automatic spell check became my crutch. Who needs to know where the a's and e's go when a little red squiggle line will gently remind you that you're an incompetent* user of the English language? As a result I also have very little tolerance for spelling errors in typed documents. The red squiggle is your best friend. Use it.

I could also blame this on my father, who, an English teacher himself back in the day, would bribe my sister and I to proofread his syllabus each year. Even now, my mom reads over any business* letter or document before he'll send it with confidence.

Only a few of my students caught on to my ironic existence* when they would ask how to spell a word and I would have to sit at the board with a furrowed brow and, after several erased attempts, tell them I wouldn't take points off if they guessed wrong. I vowed to NEVER be one of those teachers who answers the question of "how do you spell ____" with "D-I-C-T-I-O-N-A-R-Y." First of all, a dictionary is just another reason for johnny to have something to throw out the window. But secondly, you have to already know how to spell a word in order to find it in a timely fashion. For the 4th grade spelling bee I missed the word "immediately," and was sent to the dictionary to correct my error. But when my error was starting with an e instead of an i, an hour later I was in tears at my desk and may or may not have said some choice words to the long-term substitute.

I'm sure there's some sort of CD-ROM I could invest in that would teach me the rules for keeping/dropping vowels in compound nouns (judgment* always kills me), but honestly I'd rather invest in Rosetta Stone software. After all, spelling in Spanish is so much easier...

*denotes any word I originally misspelled in this post.