Why Schoolteachers Hate ‘im

Experience, Poem 1 Minute

“Erm, excuse me Miss?”,

“Yes, Robin?”,

“Err you’ve spelt ‘woman’ wrongβ€” it should have an ‘A’ instead of an ‘E'”,

“…no, it looks correct…”,

“Wait, what? ‘women’ is the plural spelling of ‘woman'”,

“No, this is the correct spelling for ‘woman'”,

“It’s ‘one womAn’, ‘two womEn’!
…How do you spell the plural of ‘woman’?”,

“w. o. m. e. n.”,

(Oh my fuck),
“Surely I’m not the only one who’s noticed the mistake, right?”

…looks around…

one or two people just agree with the teacher,

(Oh my fucking shit).

Photo by Gustavo Fring from Pexels

I have now found some sort of a satisfying explanation for thisβ€” this spelling mistake is one of the most common ones which I notice everywhere on the internet.

It’s slightly possible that there are still mistakes in this writing, but I always pick them up after a few more readings πŸ˜‰.

Anyway, I realise that ability to learn and reproduce spellings is more down to the wiring of the brain than experience, but I feel that this story gives me bragging rights because I stood my ground and it was so frustrating! πŸ˜†

πŸŒͺ

Published by 𝑹𝒐𝑩𝑰𝑡 πŸͺ

I write poems which are mental health-themed, creative or humourous :). Within mental health I write a lot about: ADHD, OCD, anxiety, autism, emotional traumaβ€” usually with an optimistic slant. My goals for my blog are to give myself a therapeutic, creative outlet whilst also being able to connect with and relate to other people.

Published

17 thoughts on “Why Schoolteachers Hate ‘im”

    1. I’ve never had that problem actually. It all just comes intuitively. If I make mistakes it’s from simple typos. It’s extremely rare that I genuinely have the wrong spelling in my head now. But I never get similar looking words confused because it’s as if they’re spelt completely differently, hard to explain.

      So it’s always been like that for me, and one of my brothers. It’s only relatively recently that I’ve realised how much brain wiring matters with this. So the woman/women mistake seemed such an unlikely one to make to me, as strange and confusing as woman and spider. Because phonetic similarity doesn’t matter for me. People with dyslexia confuse similar sounding words because they’re approaching language very differently with an empathasis on the sounds of words, rather than the symbols for them.

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      2. Anyway I’m really keen for more people to understand this crucial difference between these two main ways that people seem to perceive language, because it really disadvantages people with the dyslexic way of doing it, or they receive a lot of stigma or frustration from people who do it the other way. And it’s especially bad with English because the connection between spelling and pronunciation is so loose.

        The information is all right there and can save so many occurrences of people endlessly correcting somebody’s spelling, and that person feeling anxiety, to absolutely no purpose at all πŸ˜†.

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      4. Ah ha! But here’s a funny thing!! I’ve never viewed the job of an English teacher to teach spelling, or anything to do with it. Or learning rote systems for spelling words has always felt unnecessary for me. Even grammar! That came intuitively through reading. So I honestly had no purpose for English lessons most of the time, and often questioned why we were having them in an English-speaking country! It’s still such an alien concept to me.

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      5. Sorry, I started my other blog to avoid these long comment essays πŸ˜† but then became too depressed to write on it. Maybe I could do it again now.

        Liked by 1 person

      7. Thanks :). Nah, I still don’t trust the stability of my situation. I’ll wait a bit longer to see if it’s stable. But I’m almost completely isolated from the rest of the house now, so it should be if medication keeps working. No pressure anyway, I need to get my energy back.

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      11. Even more than that, you only come to have more respect for people who find spelling difficult and still put in the effort to write anything, especially in this text-based world at the moment, rather than less!

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      12. There are lots of examples where I’ve learned words through reading before hearing them, or before connecting them up with the sound of them. But I have no problem spelling them and usually pronounce them in my own way, until I reach a funny situation where I realise I’m pronouncing it wrong.

        (I was struggling to type this paragraph because of OCD πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈ).

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