Apart from seldom working well
Rules are boring, dull as hell.
They are so dull you can’t recall
More than one or two at all.
Maybe spelling should be taught
With very little conscious thought.
It may be simpler than it seems
To do the job by other means.
Instead of teaching rules let’s tell
Students just to learn to spell.
Teaching a spelling by a rule
Can make you look a perfect fool.
You find a rule you think will do it
But zillions of exceptions to it
Turn up at once – spelled different ways –
Leaving your student in a daze
And unconvinced. Perhaps it’s better
Just to learn the English letter
Patterns as they come along;
Thinking about them feels all wrong.
Rules get in the way it is easy to see
(‘I before E” is no help to me!).
They stop you from writing without any thought
For your spelling. We certainly ought
To refrain, if we can, from temptations to teach
Any method implying a student should reach
For his consciousness, therein to paddle around
In worrying mystery until he has found
A Heath-Robinson set of instructions which may
(Or may well, indeed not) assist him to say
What he’s probably, by now, forgotten again
And which may, therefore, never arrive at his pen.
Let us teach to the patterns of unconsciousness
(maybe using L.C.W.C./S.O.S.
Via ‘language experience”) – give thinking a break;
Thinking too much is a basic mistake!