How do you spell 'atrocious'?

Does spell-check help or hurt kids? Do they really need to know how to spell anyway if most of their work is done on computers? How important is it? Should spell-check be disabled on school computers so kids have to proof-read and use a dictionary to check spelling?

I will now never forget how to spell 'reminiscent' because I went through 2 different spellings and a conversation in trying to find the correct one. Then I used spell-check (should that be hyphenated?).

Teachers are taught to let their students make mistakes - and don't catch them! Let them fall and figure out how to get back up. The best learning happens when a person makes a mistake and has to find where they went wrong. Just being told the right answer (spell-check) doesn't require any thinking.

I would like to disable spell check at my school. I think it hurts the kids. Especially as they move into the higher grades with more difficult vocabulary.

But would allowing spell-check encourage them to use bigger, harder, awesomer (spell-check doesn't like this one) words if they don't have to be able to spell it?

What a quandary. (that's a good one!)

Spelling tests in high school? How much should spelling count with computers everywhere?

Then there's math. We have calculators and computers that can do all sorts of math. Yet we keep teaching how to do the math by hand, to the great frustration of students. Why should you know how to add 223 and 4738436 if you can just put it in a calculator?

Typewriters. That's what I'll do. Find some old typewriters, not the electric ones with the delete capability, but really old school typewriters. Have kids type a paper on those and see the mistakes they make. When you can't delete, spell- and grammar-check, and go back and change things whenever you want, just think about what that would look like. It would completely change how you type. And maybe it would change how students think when they write. Because that's what I'm here for, anyway. My goal is not to teach these kids how to graph quadratic functions or determine the acceleration of a plane during lift-off (though, if they do learn those things it would be cool). No, my goal is to teach the kids how to think. How to reason. How to solve problems they've never seen before.

And how can you do that if the computer always solves the problem for them?

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By the way, this post has no spelling errors (with the exception of 'awesomer', but really that should be added to the dictionary anyway)! Thanks ABC*check*!