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ABCs and 123s
Up until today, I had never heard of
the Simplified Spelling Society and quite frankly, I wish I hadn't now. Forget the fact that their solution for raising the literacy level seems to be lowering the bar so that the little darlings don't have to work so hard.
It's annoying but no more than No Child Left behind seems to strive for in a more sweeping and institutional way. No, what appalls me is that they (or rather, this woman, Ms. Bell)
propose that standard English spelling be changed to reflect only pronunciation
Really?
Whose pronunciation, Ms Bell? Yours? Mine? Sean Connery's? P. Diddy's? Can you say entrenched regional differences, Ms. Bell? Well, she could say it but being British, when she said it I suspect it would sound vastly
different than when I - having grown up in Houston - said it. And then what of the poor people taking notes? How would they spell it? According to her pronunciation or mine?
Ms Bell, on behalf of the society, states - in poorly spelled emails - that current English spelling gives you no clue as to the meaning of the word. Hell-buckets woman! Half the time the word in context isn't much help
either. Again, I point of the vast regional differences of English across the globe. The usage differences between US and UK English alone make take up shelves of space in the neighborhood linguistic society.
What a terrible idea this is! You want to improve the literacy levels and skills of children? How about making them learn instead of changing the answer to suit their TXT MSG abilities. What is wrong with a little
memorization? Broaden the range of reading materials or - I can't stress this enough - bring back sentence diagramming.
This whole thing reminds me - I have similar comments about the multiplication tables. My father, who loves math and all things algebra, has been tutoring junior high math this past year and instead of doing the tables as I
recall doing over and over, the kids just now do it on calculators. They can't do any math in their head. I'm not asking they be able to do advanced calculus with their hands tied behind their backs. But they ought to
be able to do 5x5 in their heads.
Whew!
Sorry to rant - but wow, that got me going this morning.
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