To all you parents or teachers out there
Does anyone think this a bit harsh
My 9 year old has a new teacher, fresh out of Teacher School, beginning of the last school year.
Anyway regularly they give the kids spelling tests on a Friday and she scores well. All fine.
The new teacher however decided that not only should the 15 words be l learnt in advance but also memorised, meaning she wouldn't read them out on the day.
My nipper was quite stressed about this as you can imagine, I just wondered if this was normal teaching method as we thought it was a bit extreme/sudden.
R
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Learning in advance is common enough but I've not encountered the memory test before with any of mine.
If I've understood your post correctly though this teacher is lumping together a spelling test with a memory test. This is totally preposterous! I don't know what the new teacher thinks they are doing, but such a test will achieve nothing but a classroom of alienated kids. She should have been taught in college that the cornerstone of good testing (or indeed any scientific activity) is to separate out all the variables. If someone does badly on their test, what will that say; that they are bad at spelling? that they have a poor memory? that they couldn't concentrate because the rules have changed? It could be any, all or none of those things. The only thing we'd learn for certain that it is a poor test.
If a teacher wants to check spelling ability they should run a (properly conducted) spelling test, if they want to find out who has a good memory or not they should try something like playing Kim's Game. By confusing to two, they will probably just confuse the kids.
At Henry jnrs School they have to write a sentence using the new word in the correct context for homework (spelling and meaning) and then do a test during the week.
They also do 20 mental arithmetic questions
No, I'm a psychologist with qualifications in adult training.
:)
Kim's game is a method for testing memory, where you put a number of items on a tray or table top, give people a certain amount of time to look at it and then see how many they can recall. You can test in different ways by varying the number of items, the viewing time, the time lapsed between viewing and recall, giving prompts to recall and a number of other things . The beauty of it is that as well as being very flexible, you can make it like a party game so that the kids just think they are having fun rather than being tested.
No but I wish I had his money ;-)
We used to play that game at parties when I was a kid - good fun.
If a teacher says the word you can take a guess at how its spelled. By learning the words as well you have to study harder.
For once teachers are aking children work as hard as they used to.
As Stig said above, this test is testing their memory and their spelling at the same time, so it doesn't necessarily give you meaningful data about either. If the kid only writes down 5 words, is that because they can only remember 5, or can only remember how to spell five? If one of the words they should have learnt was "flour" but they wrote down "flower", was that because they remembered the wrong word or the wrong spelling? To be honest, I'd argue that it's a more useful skill to be able to work out how a word should be spelled from how it sounds, rather than just learning the entire word by rote, as it helps you develop the skills to tackle unfamiliar words.
".. the flower looked beautiful", or alternatively, ".. Jane added Flour to her cake mixture".
I've just started temping in a primary school in East London and quite frankly I'm a bit shocked at the amount of pressure put onto the children regarding tests. I've only ever worked in Secndary and special needs schools where SAT's have thankfully been abandoned. SAT's are still used in primary schools in my opinion not to gauge the ability of the pupils but to ensure that the school moves up the national league tables. Testing of pupils begins at a stupidly early stage in order to prepare them for the kinds of tests they will encounter in year 6 and so, as early as year 3, pupils are taught English Maths and Science almost exclusively and tested on their subject knowledge. It could be Raz that, as you say, the teaching being recently qualified, is being a little bit over keen. My advice would be to see how things go to start off with, if your kid seems really put out by this kind of testing it might be worth having a polite word in the teachers ear expressing your concerns. The whole thing sounds like an American method, a bit like a spelling bee.
Thats wy my spelleng is so good.
Another used to pick you up by your hair sometimes he would actually ripe it out. Move behind you grab your hair and yank head back ------nice. After 20 years we had a class reunion and some one invited this wanker. After a few beers i asked him if he wuld like to attempt that on anyone there and then ? must have lost he bollox in the 20 years as he didnt seem like he wanted to or for that matter stay around.
Blame the liberal lefty Guardian reading PC brigade mate,they have taken all that power away from the teachers.
If I ran home to Mummy every time I didn't like something at school and she went and complained to the teacher I imagine I wouldn't have much respect for the teacher either.
However I agree (if that's the point you are making) that you should take what your child says with pinch of salt, there are always two sides to every story. I also took the precaution of talking to lots of other parents of kids in the same class, and trod carefully when presenting it to teacher.
The Teacher also admitted to me she was having problems with the discipline of the class the previous term, born out by what my little soldierette had reported back to us.