The end of spelling?

Those of you who are regular readers of epistemicgames.org know that I am not a big fan of spending lots of instructional time teaching spelling. But if you are going to do it, I suppose you should at least do it right.

This bombshell just out from the British "National Strategies" for teaching (from an AP report):

It’s a spelling mantra that generations of schoolchildren have learned — "i before e, except after c."

But new British government guidance tells teachers not to pass on the rule to students, because there are too many exceptions.

The "Support For Spelling" document, which is being sent to thousands of primary schools, says the rule "is not worth teaching" because it doesn’t account for words like ‘sufficient,’ ‘veil’ and ‘their.’

Ironically, though, at least part of the problem here is that teachers (apparently) haven’t been teaching the whole rule, which, of course, goes: "i before e except after c, or when sounding like a, as is neighbor and weigh." That would address ‘veil’ and ‘their’ and presumably several other exceptions (like, um, ‘neighbor’ and weigh’).

So when we teach a skill that a computer can teach, we haven’t even been teaching it right.