A Feast for Spitters

In general, spelling is much less of a problem for students now that it was in the early days of my career. The explanation, of course, is the judicious use of the autocorrect feature on the devices we supply each student with. 

Not even 10 years ago, we had to encourage students to run spell-check, and extra step many were unwilling to take, but now their iPads give three options even as they are typing, and some students only key in a couple of letters before tapping the word they want and moving on. 

I doubt I will ever compose like that: most of the time I don't even see the words at the bottom of my screen when I'm texting; my brain filters them out as unnecessary information to bother with. I also wonder what the long-term impact will be on a person's writing who doesn't even form whole words. Maybe research will show that there is no harm at all; that it's kind of like reading all those passages with missing and transposed letters, generally pretty easy for the fluent speaker. 

But the question of fluency brings up another consideration, too. My students who are not native English speakers like to use the suggested spelling feature as they write, but they do not always do so accurately. Take today, for example. Kids were asked if they considered spiders to be good or bad and to provide three facts and some reasoning to support this mini claim. 

Spitters are bad to the bone, one writer started with animation, because they can be Venmo's.

But, countered another, they do eat misquotes.