Easier said than done.
It’s common to miss your own spelling mistakes even after you proofread your own stuff. To catch your own misspellings it helps to read your stuff backwards… so you’re not “distracted” by the semantics of what you’re writing. Now we have automatic spellcheckers that hightlight/correct as you go so the tip is obsolete.
Not just writing – there’s a reason programmers shouldn’t debug/proof their own code.
It’s also the teacher’s job.
Every assignment I ever did was turned in, graded and I got it back with my score and the wrong things marked wrong. This isn’t a new concept.
I bet PA may have a special place in her heart for a long time. 
That or she’ll have the 50 states, spelled correctly, burned in memory.
Maybe that’s the teacher’s intent all along.
I agree with you. The teacher not telling students’ where they erred in this test is nuts.
sometimes people of all ages think in straight lines. This test is for the classroom. The teacher has to be present. I can’t google an answer for myself, I have to ask for a link.
i’m constantly amazed at how rarely people think in the way you seem to feel is a default
This is a teenager who is about to drive and be responsible for a whole lot more than remembering how to spell 50 states in the country in which she lives.
As I mentioned above there is a lesson here that not every problem encountered in life will come with a road map to problem solve.
In this case it is a pre set and known list of 50 worlds (plus or minus a “new, north, south west etc:”
It is absolutely not a bridge too far to expect a 10th grader to say "oh…ok if I’m getting SOMEthing wrong but I don’t know what then I’m just going to number a piece of paper 1-50 and then write my responses. Then in a second column NEXT to my answers I will write the CORRECT spelling from s source and then check my answers .
Are we really not expecting a 10th grader to figure this out? They need a teacher to tell them this?
There is most certainly a lesson the teacher is offering here.
I would argue that entire exercise is one of futility. Sure I could sit down for several hours and memorize this basically useless information, or spend my time doing actual geography homework. At the end of the day learning how to spell pennsylvania is not necessary, and the way this teacher forced their students to learn them was inefficient at best and straight up idiotic at worst. Everybody knows good feedback is the key to learning. How much could you learn swimming if your coach after every lap just said “nope, wrong, do it again”
Each of us on this forum probably spend years and years memorizing how to accurately spell vocab words. It’s an exercise in and of itself. Even though the states don’t contribute to our daily language we’re talking about a 10th grader learning some pretty foundational geography of her own country.
At the very least, with how education is trending, I don’t see it a problem to have a 10th grader spend time learning this.
There’s all sorts of “useless” information that we cover in school growing up that doesn’t directly translate to daily practice however the process is what’s important.
Why did I have to spend time to learn long division in fourth grade?
Why did I have to spend time to memorize words that I probably wasn’t going to ever use until I was much older?
Why did I have to spend time to learn a language and memorize those words and conjugations that I probably wouldn’t have to use or there would be other methods to get by?
Why did I have to spend time to read certain books in English class that I didn’t care about or ever talk about again?
Why did I have to spend time knowing different kinds of rock or clouds?
The point isn’t the information. The point is the process. The fact that people are arguing that expecting a 10th grader to figure out which states she is spelling wrong is a bridge too far is, frankly, absurd.
To your point, yes, everyone views different information as useless depending on their own knowledge and experience. I am biased towards my own view of useful information in my own life experience.
I have more of a problem with the method of all or nothing and no feedback than the actual content.
Knowing the location of the states is important. Yes, you can look them up. But, it is valuable to be able to discuss geography (or the geographic aspects of politics, travel, sociology, etc.) without needing to consult a resource. Having a mental map of the states makes reading on a variety of topics more meaningful.
By contrast, memorizing the state capitals is basically just trivia. Though it might be an exercise in practicing memorization, the information itself has much lower value. I am from New England but cannot think of any instance in which knowing Montpelier made any difference.
On the spectrum of usefulness, spelling a state is less important than knowing its location but more important than knowing its capital.
The information here isn’t really the point though, right? It’s that “hey…this is a time for you to learn some problem solving.” And if it’s a social studies class or global or whatever then that’s just the associated subject matter.
I think if this as a 10th grader who is going to be preparing for higher education possibly. You don’t always get the highlighted, underscored, italicized, tabbed problem area. Some things require a full checklist to go down.
And in this case it’s a very simple and straightforward checklist of only 50 words. Seems awfully age-appropriate to me.
Before grad school I had to take some additional courses at my local community college. I took a psych class and the teacher was going over the format for our first exam. Kids started panicking when they found out there was no word bank for the “fill in the blank” section. They spend a good ten minutes begging, trying to persuade her to change her mind.
As far as I’m concerned these were adults and they weren’t prepped well-enough.
If we can’t appreciate a small exercise like this teacher in the OP is doing, then I’d say we are lowering the bar too much.
It’s all or nothing with unlimited tries. I don’t mind that approach. Raises the stakes to incentivize the kids to persevere.
Troubleshooting and checking your own work are extremely valuable skills. If an instructor is always highlighting your error, you don’t learn to troubleshoot and find them yourself.
Exactly.
There are two different issues here.
One issue is the value of learning to memorize and developing the patience/habits necessary to do that. That (IMO) has value. But, while you’re at it, why not memorize something useful — like some aspects of state geography — rather than memorizing 50 digits of pi? That was the focus of my comment.
Another issue is what our expectations should be re: how the student learns the material, figures out their mistake, corrects it, etc. I think that is one virtue of this teacher’s approach. Rather than taking the test once, getting, say, a 90, and moving on, this forces the student to grapple with whatever aspect of the test they find hard and overcoming that challenge. It may seem trivial to those of us who can spell fairly well, but we should accept that it can be a greater challenge for some students. Still, it’s good for them to overcome that challenge and perhaps gain some confidence from it, rather than just say I got a B on the test because I am not a good speller.
Yes, too many here are getting caught in how, when, where, and not the why? It’s a bit shocking the comments of taking the teacher to the woodshed here, and some others about the content of the quiz. This is a young, learning mind, and these are templates to further learning and connections, as well as lessons that will be valuable in real life later on. If it were my kids, I would have made sure they learned this lesson with the multiple tries, and not looked for a scapegoat to blame for something so minor…
Yes, but there are more and less effective ways to achieve this. I like the above poster’s example of a swimming coach.
Not effective to say “nope, do another lap”, without knowing what part of your stroke is off and holding you back. The analogy works for any sport really, and much of education.
If the concept is understood and it’s just a matter of executing something, this approach may be exactly what is required.
Knowing what to do and executing it are different things and eventually the athlete has to figure it out.
That analogy isn’t the same though. In the swimming example you’re saying the athlete doesn’t know what they’re doing wrong.
In the classroom example the student HAS the list of correct information (known spellings/locations from any source) and the incorrect information (their version of spelling/locations).
The student has all they need to analyze and make the necessary corrections.
The analogous examlle for swimming is if the coach said “keep your elbow high and head down” but then the athlete saw a video of them swimming and could see if their elbow was up and head down. That way they’d have the desired/correct goals as well as their performance to compare and see where they need to make corrections.
Agreed.
As we talked about earlier, what we’re dealing with is a 10th grader telling a parent what happened, and that parent relaying the information to us over a chat forum. There’s a lot that gets lost in those steps of translation.
I walked away from the classroom 22 years ago, but I will say that teaching is one of the few professions that everyone thinks they’re an expert on, they’re all wrong, and the default assumption is that the teacher sucks.
My gut feelings on this one:
Though its also entirely possible that they is just a terrible teacher, but they don’t often teach honors classes.