6th December 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
A form tutor at Gleed Girls’ Technology College in Spalding has recently been criticised for poor spelling and grammar. The UK Press Association reported that the tutor sent an email to a student’s parents after she couldn’t meet them for parents’ evening, and the email contained 14 spelling and grammatical errors.
Some of the errors in the email could be put down simply to typing errors, such as “attenance”, “requriements” and “everning”. However, others can’t be explained so easily, like “role modal”, “boardering” and “occaisions”. There were also numerous instances of misplaced apostrophies.
Marie Clair, a spokeswoman for the plain English campaign said that the email was an “extreme case” of bad use of language, and highlighted the importance of the way in which we communicate. She added "But if we stand back from it a little bit and think why that is happening, there's all sorts of reasons that could be responsible." It wasn’t clear whether this was a written statement or the transcript of a speech, but it should be noted that “there’s” should read “there are”.
Clair claimed that the mistakes are indicative of the way in which we live today, and that they don’t necessarily imply that the culprit is a bad teacher. She claimed that mistakes are common in emails and text messages, and because we’re living in an increasingly fast-paced world, people are becoming less careful about the messages they send. This is a reasonable point of view, but it doesn’t explain mistakes where it appears that the teacher has intended to spell a word in the way it is written. It also calls into question the care and attention taken by teachers when communicating with students and their parents.
The mother of the student doesn’t wish to be named, and said that she was concerned about the teacher’s ability. This comes shortly after the education secretary, Michael Gove, called for more emphasis to be placed on spelling and grammar. Although it’s assumed that this was aimed at students rather than their teachers.