See, this is my honors child...the one who, since kindergarten has been the child each of her teachers stated would do great things....12 years later she is an English major....taking AP this year in English, Government and Economics, on the Newspaper and Yearbook......she will graduate with distinguished honors....even her new teachers are excited about her being in their classes, so much so the counselor called her to tell her.......
AND while we are very proud of her and her siblings, I was dumbfounded when she asked me how to spell IMMEDIATELY and then asked me if she had spelled AVID right.....I guess after thinking about it, I was just a little perplexed. Of course I too spell things wrong and have to admit that I have become reliant on my browser's ability to underline in red what it does not recognize as being spelled right, especially on my blog......but all and all I am a very good speller....
Such a small thing, but such a big impact.....to me, being a good speller comes with being a good reader....which my daughter is, in fact all of them are........so why the issue? As a comparison I asked my middle daughter to spell IMMEDIATELY to which she did without issue, and while she is a strong English student, her areas in honors lie in math and science.....and come to think of it, she has not had a computer for as long as her older sister either.
Even though I know what classes my children take, and I have guided each of them so that they will be prepared for college, I guess I get to own up to being a bad mother now for not knowing exactly what is in the syllabus. But since they are such great students, I guess I just assumed they each had vocabulary, never really asked them about it. Anyway, I spoke to the girls about their English classes and they both stated that they did indeed have vocabulary, but my older daughter said that in her course, it is such a small part of the class, that her lowest grades were in that area, usually in the low 80's. She said that she did not study as hard for her vocabulary as she did the Lit part ....considering the course often had her reading European Poetry as well as Literature of up to 800 pages, but even with her explanation, she got a dirty look from mom it. She did get a 94% in the class, but imagine what she would have gotten had she not blown off her vocab, not to mention the fact that it is far easier for her to ask me how to spell something then to be confident in her own knowledge of it.....
This will be my daughter's third high school in four years and for the last two years she attended a high school that had block scheduling. For those out there that do not know what this is, it is where you complete a course in a semester instead of a year (much like college, same amount of information put out over a shorter period of time, but for a longer class time). The classes are 90 minutes long instead of the 40 or 45, and you have 4 a semester for a total of 7 or 8 credits per year......instead of having the standard year with 4 quarters, you only have two, when progress reports are sent home they are pretty much looked at like a quarter grade that does not count.
So I'm curious......
Is it the computer age? Did her attendance at one high school that had normal scheduling and then 2 years at one with block scheduling affect her and the way she had to study in order to pass classes that were shorter with just as much information....or was it something else? Many experts say that our adolescents are more prone to low attention spans due to over exposure to television and gaming, but what does it say about computers?
The following is taken from an April, 2008 Article in the NY Times:
James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, drew laughs when he expressed concern about what he called “the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought, the sentence,” because young Americans are doing most of their writing in disjointed prose composed in Internet chat rooms or in cellphone text messages.In an age when we use computers as if they were always part of our lives.....when most of our children think they always have been, are we losing certain aspects of old-school learning while we focus learning how to use our computer programs? We now rely on the computer for everything from writing mail to writing books and blogs... as digital photo albums and for online support and friendships.... We communicate with our friends and share information via Myspace, Facebook and other like websites. We use programs to balance our checkbooks, watch movies and listen to music, use web-cams and talk on the phone to our loved ones thousands of miles away, use spreadsheets and charts to explain everything from household chores to major proposals by large corporations.... and so much more. All things we used to have to do by hand or without the aid of our expanding technology. How often do you hear someone state that their laptop contains "everything" on it or when it crashes they are determined to save the data?
“Overall, American students’ writing skills are deteriorating,” said Will Fitzhugh, the founder of Concord Review, a journal published in Massachusetts that features history research papers written by high school students. He expressed skepticism that the national assessment accurately measured students’ overall writing skills because, he said, it only tests their ability to write very brief essays jotted out in half an hour.
“The only way to assess the kind of writing that students will have to do in college is to have them write a term paper, and then have somebody sit down and grade it — and nobody wants to do that, because it’s too costly,” he said.Mr. Fitzhugh cited findings of a 2006 survey of college professors, in which a large majority said they thought most high school graduates came to college with limited writing skills.
With so much being accomplished with the aid of computers, is one small program that we all use at one time or another .....called SPELLCHECK, making our children less smart? Or is it just a compounding problem of many media applications? I don't know the exact answer to it, but what I do know is that the idea has opened my eyes up a little bit more AND that I will be checking to ensure my Senior will be studying her vocabulary a little harder this year......
By the way, the word spellcheck, was not recognized as a word by my computer.....funny.
