Teachers Emails Have Bad Grammar,

My 17 yr old dgtrs cheer sponsor (also a pre-ap English teacher) sends out the most hilarious emails all the time to the cheer parents. They are littered with mistakes, however, she is taking a few minutes of her very valuable time to COMMUNICATE with us about upcoming events. I appreciate that she is sharing information and keeping us up to date, I only care about her grammer and spelling when she is teaching 10th grade english. Try to appreciate why she is sending the emails, and cut her some slack.

I was just reading that schools of education are considered the greatest violators of grade inflation.

Updated

I was just reading that schools of education are considered the greatest violators of grade inflation.

To me there's nothing wrong with her wording. No one perfect and noteveryteacher is an English porfessor.

You can certainly mention it to the principal.
Just clean up your own errors first, if you wish to be taken seriously.
As an editor I counted about twenty grammatical mistakes/typos in this question alone.
Remember, mother is the first and best teacher of all.

If I were posting complaining about someone's grammar and spelling, I probably would've spell checked it first. (Just saying...) If her errors are on a Kindergarten or 1st grade level, I would be concerned. The errors you mentioned are on a 5th - 8th grade level, so I would only be really concerned if she were teaching older kids. That said, grammar is also a pet peeve of mine, and it is unprofessional to have the errors that you mentioned. It just doesn't warrant involving the principal for those errors unless she is teaching older kids.

When I taught elementary, I am quite certain I made mistakes. We were supposed to have another teacher check all of our letters that went home (most parents of our students did not have email). Did we double/triple check every time? No, because the life of a teacher is endless and there's always something else on our list to do next.

I'm sure the teacher is teaching the difference between their and they're and your vs you're. But when writing a letter, we make simple mistakes like this, probably read over it once, and still hit 'send' without noticing the mistakes. Heck. I've done this on MP plenty of times! You have plenty of errors in your message to us. You maybe notice 2 or 3 of them, but with a scrutinizing eye, we notice a lot more. I say chill out till next year and see what happens. If he DOES have her again, perhaps at the beginning of the year, say something about how you would love to help her with 'to-send-home letters and such.' Maybe make up some story about how you love grading papers and editing work. Maybe she'll enlist your help to write the letters or something.

forgot to add: When I was writing letters home one school I taught at, I was writing in SPANISH (my second language, parent's native language.) I'm sure they were DEVASTATED to read some of my poor grammar. I knew when and where to put accent marks, but would always forget whether to use ser or estar, whether it's para or por, or which verb tense to use in certain scenarios. I'm sure they laughed at my poor excuse of a letter. But not one parent ever called me out on it. They knew I was teaching math, teaching English, teaching history, and so forth. They didn't worry about a few verb tenses wrong here and there. They didn't worry about a couple misspellings. Because in the end, they knew I was educating their children, and that their children would educate me at the same time (with my spanish!).

Here's my take on it:

She did use spell check, because these are proper spellings, just not grammatically correct. So she is trying...

My guess is that she's like a lot of teachers-- she works long hours and may be distracted. Perhaps she has kids at home who need her attention. Perhaps she's answering a slough of parent emails. Perhaps she's doing these parent/teacher communication emails on the fly after having a day with the kids. I can tell you as a preschool teacher, after a day with a class full of little ones, my brain is usually fried because it's intense work and I've been 'on' for hours. When I did my blog updates for my preschool, it was always on a day I hadn't been teaching,and even then, the writing of it took at least an hour. I know the director of my son's preschool always seems to have a newsletter on the days after she wasn't teaching the group, too. While the spelling and grammar errors are regrettable, unless there's a real problem with her teaching, I would let it go.

The average American reads and writes between a 7th and 8th grade level.
Yes, our college educated teachers also fall into this range.
Text and spell check have massacred our language abilities.

I would probably pop into the classroom and observe to see if the email errors were bleeding into the classroom instruction. Are the handouts she is using correct? Is she teaching proper grammar usage? Those types of things.

If your child is assigned to her classroom for the next school year, then speak to her about your concerns. Just be gentle, and non-accusatory.

My son (age 16), in some instances, has a broader vocabulary than his teachers. We discuss the etymology of words and how common usage and meaning has changed over time. He has an excellent vocabulary and has always read well beyond his grade level. But, he could not spell his way out of a box and diagramming a sentence is torture for him.

Distressing as it is that her teacher is so relaxed in her emails this should not adversely effect your daughter's future education.

Yes, my kindergarten son's teacher does send emails with errors. I never was bothered by it because I know she is busy and her mind is running a million miles a minute with 30, 5 & 6 year old students to deal with each day. I personally know that she is well educated with a master's degree, so does it bother me that she makes the occassional grammatical errors that aren't corrected by spell check? It bothers me no more then your question which is chock full of em'! Give the lady a break, not one of us is perfect all the time.

If she's TREACHING the kids bad spelling and grammar, that's one thing. If she's sending out emails on her iPhone during a 10 minute break (anyone notice how bad my spelling has gotten these past few months? No computer right now, and autocorrect is killing me), that's another.

Similarly, a teacher can be PHENOM at x (early childhood Ed, math, lit, history), and weak at y (early childhood Ed, math, lit, history, etc.). Which is why subjects start splitting into different classrooms in a couple years.

So again, the issue to me would be what she's teaching, as opposed to her strengths and weaknesses if they don't enter into what she's teaching.

Lisa, I am with you on this. I may make mistakes personally but on a professional level I try to do better. Unfortunately (as is clear from many responses) it is acceptable to accept subpar work from teachers as they are busy. While I agree that teachers do a very important job I am getting very frustrated with this culture of thinking that they are the most overworked human beings out there. Kindergarten and Elementary school teachers do not have the same level of work and stress as High School teachers so they should not all be grouped together, especially if we are not going to expect the K and E teachers to use good grammar when communicating with parents.

I love my daughter's G1 teacher but to hear how stressful everything is these last few weeks of school gets tiresome when the stress of my job isn't going away for 11 weeks while I also try to find ways to keep my child entertained and educated.

It's all perspective, but the bottom line is, we need to stop making excuses and accepting less and we need to be open to constructive criticism in order to improve ourselves.

Wow, can someone help me off this pedestal/high horse? I’m not used to getting so high up this early in the morning.

bottom line, she's a kindergarten teacher, not a physics professor. not to minimize what they do, but it IS kindergarten - she's not going to be teaching their/there, or you're/your, is she? if she was i might say something...but as it is i'd have to really squelch that part of me that is sooo anal about stuff like that :)

if it makes you feel better, my BOSS does the same thing...and she is one of the most respected people in our company, set to retire in about 2 years. but her to/too issues drive me nuts :)

(and yes, i neglect to capitalize. sue me. i know the difference between to and too, ya'll! lol!)

I think a teacher should spell well.
I believe I would try to figure out an anonymous way of letting her know it's being noticed.

Print out one of her emails, correct it, and mail it back to her in care of the school with a friendly note stating that you wish she would be more careful in the future because it is concerning.

No, my son's teacher does not, but I also have a relationship with them where I could say something like, "Hey Jenny, were they crawling all over you while you were at the keyboard yesterday?" That kick starts a conversation about silly errors that I "assumed" were from the kids crawling on her, and we could have a laugh about it. This way she knows to double check because it was noticed. Honestly, when sending out letters for the PTA I would always have myself, the spell check, the admin asst, and a teacher or two (eng and sp) check the letters just in case. When I want to I do pretty well for myself, but there are days, mostly on the Spanish ones (eng to sp grammar is tricky) when even I do not know what I was thinking and we all laugh about it. Ex: I wanted to say dual (as in multiples) and I typed duel (as in a duel to the death!), and I did this to BOTH the English and Spanish letters! So, I would lighten up a little bit or get on terms where your bringing it up is a "non issue."

Hmmm, response with bad grammar, or no response?? I'll take your prob over mine.

Honestly, If when speaking to her you hear poor grammar, or if when sending out class notices or informational handouts she is making these mistakes then maybe i would mention it to her, but ...

IF this is her only fault and everything else she does is good, I'd let it go.
Like i said i'd rather she rushed me off a quick response than to ignore my email all together.

OPPS re-read this, so it's an EMail Newsletter type of thing going out to ALL the parents?? that's a little different, still not something i feel is your place to correct.

Um, you didn't spell check or grammar check this post first. Just sayin' :) Sorry, I couldn't resist.

If this is a battle you really want to choose to fight, then by all means, go ahead. Personally, I think there are more important things to worry about than this. Luckily in kinder, they don't teach much more grammar other than to begin a sentence w/a capital and end with a period, question or exclamation mark.

I get it - it drives you nuts, it would me too! I really wouldn't waste my time though.

It's a shame that she does this. Unfortunately, it makes her look bad at her job. I can't think of any good way to go about dealing with it, to be honest.

I would wait until next year and see if your son has her.

One thing that I want to mention is that your school MAY accept invented spelling in part of first grade. This is when they allow kids to incorrectly spell words that are not yet on the spelling lists. The reason they allow it is to not squash the kids' efforts to write. Eventually, they are expected to spell more and more words the way they are supposed to be spelled, rather than how they sound. It will take a while to get to there and their, your and you're.

Some people are lousy spellers. And some people write their emails too fast and make mistakes in them. It's very easy to do that, even here on MP...

Dawn

She probably doesn't have time to spell check and grammar check backwards and forwards because she is frazzled from working with 20+ kindergarteners every day.

She's a kindergarten teacher, not a newspaper editor or high school english instructor. She really isn't teaching kids to do much of anything besides get along and write numbers and letters. I'm sure she can spell d-o-g and h-a-t. (Lots of people get their/there/they're and you're/your wrong. It bothers me too, but in reality it doesn't hurt anybody.)

Give her a break. Let it go.

I worked for a newspaper and we literally put everything together from scratch daily. I'm sure more than a few grammar mistakes and typos got through. However, that's in an entire newspaper. And, yes, we had those anonymous readers who would cut it out, correct our mistakes and send it back to us. (Not helpful, by the way). Receiving a school note with spelling/grammar mistakes is a pet peeve of mine. They must know the correct way to write and it would be nice if they took the time and effort to do so.

What about printing out the email (without your info, of course), pointing out the errors, and anonymously leaving it for the teacher?

That way, she knows people are noticing her mistakes, and realizes her errors, and no one is the bad guy.

I would be concerned, too. It's been only recently that I've cut certain people slack in this area. I've had to realize that not everybody takes to language the same way. I used to live for diagramming sentences, in two languages. I love spelling and grammar and etymology; it just MAKES PERFECT SENSE to me, so much so that I racked my brain trying to understand how it's not like this for EVERYBODY. Everybody is not wired the same, though. As first nature as it seems to be for me, I have to consider my history and my make-up. I come from a family of wordsmiths and critical thinkers. For fun, there were sports, but there were also word games and lots of reading. And Math, but that's a different subject. (To this day, I don't understand not reading and not playing Boggle and Scrabble. Aren't these staples in everybody's life?) Everything was a lesson, something fundamental that I could use forever. I was taught to learn and keep learning. My great great aunt would never let us get away with saying, "I don't know," in response to being asked why we had done something. She taught us that there is always a reason, and it was our job to know why we did whatever we did. Right now, I don't accept "I don't know" from people, especially other adults. (This makes my husband crazy.) When I write, I don't mind looking up a word to make sure that I use it exactly as I mean to. This combination made me a classroom dream...or nightmare, depending on the teacher.

I say all that to say that not everybody learns the same, and not everybody is taught the same, and not everybody's home environment is nurturing to this type of teaching. I do hold the bar a little higher for educators. If language skills are not their strength, then I would like to see them acknowledge that and work on it. I would like for them to refrain from saying things to the kids that they could pick up incorrectly. I don't think that this is too much to ask. I think that it should be part of their Continuing Education, since it affects communication. It bothers me that at the very top, this is thought of as "no big deal". It does hurt people. I think that we should not cut people slack just because the newsletter is not required. If it's that easy for someone (teacher) to misuse the language, then that someone needs to take every opportunity to practice so that it becomes second (or first?) nature to SAY IT RIGHT. If wrong rolls out better than right, then that's a problem, no matter how insignificant any one case might seem.

No student is too young to start hearing the right things; we already know that they are learning well before they even go to school. You're gonna have to make sure that you speak and spell well at home and correct her when she does not. Proof that home can outweigh the classroom--I was the kid correcting my teachers.

As a former teacher, professional communications with many errors would bother me, too. You may wish to speak with the teacher to thank her for all the communications, but mention at least one of the errors she makes often. It could help her to be more careful.

As to the suggestion in one posting that one grade level teacher works harder than an other, I would disagree strongly. I never was one to suggest that I worked harder than anyone else, either in the teaching profession or any other postion. But I know I worked six days a week, 10 hours most days, and that my students presented with same stresses (abilities, home situations, medical challenges) as older students. My position was to work with each child to make the most of whatever abilities and challenges they had. And now it is time for me to get off my high horse. With respect to all. :)

Some people just really suck at using correct grammar/spelling. And it's not always that they don't KNOW the rules, they just write quickly and don't self-correct. I get the "yours" mixed up all the time and catch it later. But in my initial writing, I often have it wrong. I write fast. If they are answering a lot of emails and don't go back and check, well, there may be some mix-ups (I know, I answer a TON of parent emails in my job...I try not to have bad grammar errors and usually triple check before sending)

Once the PTA president sent an email to all the teachers about the Tshits the PTA bought for everyone.

One of my administrators is the worst. He sent an email to the whole school saying how student actors would be "desist" at the scene (in one of those "scare the kids with a mock car accident right before prom" things they do at HS)... Yes he meant deceased. This guys is very smart just not thorough I guess. People tend to be more casual and not check as closely with email, which is so informal.

If you like her as a teacher overall, and she isn't teaching your daughter the wrong grammar in class, I would overlook the poorly checked emails!

She teaches kindergarten....
They don't learn these things in K.
And this post has a bunch of errors. But I'm pretty sure you can still help teach your kids right.

She is a kindergarten teacher, let it go. For your sake I hope you are able
to be helpful instead of condescending if your own children are mathematicians and hate writing. Some people are not good writers
they don't get it.

Wow, some harsh feedback, yikes!
Yes, it would bother me~

Well you need to ask yourself the same thing here on Mamapedia.

Yes it's ridiculous that a teacher has spelling errors. These days spelling isn't emphasized like it was in the 60s and 70s in school cirriculums. And I'm sure I spelled that wrong too! But I am amazed just on here how badly peoples' spelling and grammar is. To me it is important. But what I learned is not always what others learned and it would be condescending of me to point out to certain individuals that they missed something. Let it go. As long as you can understand the content, let it go. Because, face it, America has become a fast food, fast everything mentality. Even in how we speak and how we speak is reflected in the way we write. Try this one: I would of. People actually write that instead of what they're saying is "I would've (contraction of 'would have')" That's the epidemic.