I Can't Spell

I can’t spell. Really. I can’t. I tell people that I am a math teacher…I don’t need to spell. (ha) Now, I am not as bad as some people, but there are a bunch who can beat my socks off if there was a spell bowl in real life. And this comes from someone who got 5th place in her elementary spell bowl. That doesn’t count though. An elementary spell bowl is more about if you can memorize the words in that little book they handed out to anyone who was interested in competing. Here’s proof: I could remember the second “n” in environment, but they caught me off-guard when they gave me a practice word that was not from the book – Pencil. Yep, I got that one wrong! Thank goodness that didn’t push me off the stage. Maybe it should have as I confidently and loudly said in front of ALL the other students and parents, “OH, that’s easy. P-E-N-S-I-L.” Oh my!

Thank goodness for spell check in my word documents and emails. Spell check does not solve everything, though. What about those misspellings that are they themselves words? For example, messing up one word (such couch and coach) can sometimes radically change a sentence: I slept on my couch last night VS I slept on my coach last night. (uh oh!) I KNOW I am not the only one that has done this (not the sleeping but the using the wrong word). I bet many of you have too. I have one friend who writes for an online sports site. For a small time, he kept typing “filed goal” instead of “field goal”. I guess one gives you 3 points and the other one is what my student try to make when they throw their wadded pieces of paper in my file #13 (my trash can). Just recently I had a facebook friend who meant to say she wanted a good mattress to sleep on, but she forgot an “o” – what she really wrote was that she wanted a God mattress. Hmm, as she mentioned later, maybe that would give her the heavenly sleep she was hoping for.

Years ago, I taught keyboarding and word processing to middle school students. During the word processing phase, I made it mandatory that the students use the spell check program that came with the software. They did, but…. Well, it doesn’t help if you misspell a word and then are given a variety of choices for what the program thinks is the word you were supposed to spell. If you can’t spell, chances are high that you might not pick the right word. My students’ papers could be pretty funny at times. Finally I got smart and started writing some of these errors down for future fun. That fun is finally here (well, at least for me…it might not be funny to anyone else…which in itself is kinda funny).   :-) 

Students' Spell Checking Gone Wrong:

• When I was eleven years old, I was adapted. (Really, do you have wings now??)
• They were dancing with some fine grills. (That’s what happens when you forget to invite girls to the barbeque party.)
• They had all sores of drinks. (Ouch…that’s all I’m going to say. Ouch.)
• Do you remember the 1993 Super Bowel? (Hopefully that person used the Super Toilet.)
• They beat the Reds 3-2 in the World Serious. (This reminds me of the game I used to play with my kids that always made them giggle – “Don’t Smile!”)

• The fans are about to lose their team sprite. (Woohoo for 7-UP!)
• She thinks it’s a cereal killer. (That’s who smashed all my frosted flakes on the ground!)
• I was able to feed my sister and change her dippers. (I don’t have a clue what to say about this one other than maybe that is where all the fluids came from that were in the diaper.)
• I like breading my sister’s hair. (Ok, that’s just gross!)
• He’s not very happy go lucy. (or Mary, or Amanda or Fred….)

And finally

• It removes nasty germs such as plaque, gingivitis, calculus, cavities and much more. (And all of the math students celebrated! By the way, I do not know what this student was trying to write instead of calculus.)

I hope you had fun with these. I like to grab my book of student mistakes every once in awhile to get a good laugh. Maybe I will pull it out again for another blog someday.   :-)  By the way, any misspellings of mine tonight were definitely on purpose!!  Ha.

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