Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Whaaaaaaat?

My once-hyperlexic child is now functionally illiterate.
I'm totally serious.
How does this happen? Does this happen?

Jaysen has been slowly declining in his reading and writing skills.
He brought home his latest spelling test... 47%
My eyeballs popped out of my head and then I was shocked back to life by the bolt of lightning that shot out from the sky.

What the bloody hell, people? 47%
For those of you that know me IRL, you know that this is totally unacceptable.
Totally.
I love languages.
I am the freakin' word Guru.
My boss comes to me for spelling and grammar checks. I have a friggin dictionary with my name embossed with gold leaf on it from winning a spelling bee. I have trophies, biatches!

I make up words, because I like to play with words. They're like a big bowl of play-doh for me.
My son cannot spell.
And it's driving me nuts, because he used to be an amazing speller, reader, and writer.
When he was 2.

Oh? It's a kid-thing you say? A phase perhaps?
Okay. Lemme give you an example.

I-Y-E
It took me a couple times of reading it (and multiple deep breaths into a paper bag) to realize it apparently, is the progressive spelling for "eye".
I know. WTF? Iye? Seriously?
That is not phonetic spelling, so don't even go there with me.
He made some typical kid-errors like "wich" for "which", and so forth. But the doozies he came up with are flooring me.
Not to mention the 47%.

Oh. And he can't spell the word "nice", but can spell "fuck" perfectly.
Which is all kinds of excellent because that "ck" is tricky, dontcha know?

I am shriveling up from the inside out.
Meh.

2 comments:

Kim Wombles said...

I feel your pain and frustration. I teach freshman comp and developmental writing/reading; have for over 15 years. It drove me crazy that I could teach others, but my oldest didn't/couldn't read or spell until he was 14 (still can't spell and he's 20 -- just did a check; he can spell nice after some effort, but not fuck, so maybe that's a good thing?).

Maybe he's being inventive with his spelling the way you are inventive with language?

Sigh.

Corrie Howe said...

Wow! That is interesting. Have you talked to the teachers or school to get their take?