Wrenlee is a lively, spontaneous and friendly 10-year-old student entering the fifth grade. Cognitive testing placed her between the average to above average range for most of the domains assessed.
Wrenlee’s spelling and writing are a different story. They are causing much anxiety in the household.
Here are some of Wrenlee’s spelling errors and samples of sentences she wrote to a prompt:
- cook/cooke
- reach/reche
- circle/courkel
- ruin/rowen
- watch/wauch
- explain/espan
- I whish for my best fierd to live with Me.
- I whish to get anothu dog.
- I love to do hoars backrinding camp and playing with firendes.
In this era of increased involvement with artificial intelligence and other technologies, the question I ask relative to spelling and writing samples like Wrenlee’s is, does it matter?
Does it matter that she can’t spell or barely write a sentence?
It is my sense that spelling and writing issues like Wrenlee’s, are not ringing too many bells of concern at the school level.
Perhaps it’s generational.
To a younger teacher something like spelling and being able to write sentences may be old school, so yesterday, something that can be easily remedied through technology.
Why spend time on something like spelling when autocorrect is right there? Why bother worrying about completing sentences, when “Grammarly” is your technology assistant, cleaning up your sentence fragments, run-ons and punctuation?
What’s your opinion? Does it matter?