Teaching Kids How To Spel

I like to think that I'm a good speller--after all, I did win a Spelling Bee waaaaay back in grade school (heh). Imagine my horror when I stumbled upon an article in Yahoo!, where an organization called "Simplified Spelling Society" is pushing to change the spelling of words to reflect how they're pronounced. Yes, change the spelling of words to reflect how they're pronounced.

Wow. Just...wow. After the initial outrage (and wincing at the writing style of the author...I picture her patting herself on the back, thinking how clever she is), I continued reading, if only to find out what their motivations were. From what I gather, Simplified Spelling advocates are arguing that the current system of spelling is "confusing" to children; words like "enough" is pronounced "ehnuf", but "dough" is pronounced "doh"; their way, they claim, would accelerate learning among children. This way of thought even had some high-profile advocates such as Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster and Mark Twain.

Now wait a minute, I thought. Franklin? Webster? Twain? Big names! Of course, I googled it to make sure. Franklin, yes. Daniel Webster, not really sure, might have confused him with Noah Webster. Mark Twain--well, I managed to find his essay on it, which seemed to argue that it will save pen strokes; unfortunately, this doesn't really apply in this day and age, when more often than not people bang away on a keyboard, and some words such as "education" spelled as it is currently require less keystrokes than "edyukayshun". Twain also seems to be promoting a sort of shorthand as well.

So what to make of all this? Well, personally I think it's nearly impossible to implement. It's too massive a change--imagine all the textbooks that have to be re-written, all the teachers that need to be re-taught. Most important of all, it's too confusing for the wee ones. Imagine mastering several difficult words in the third grade, only to be told to forget everything you've learned in the fourth grade. It's like that Twilight Zone episode Wordplay where the father wakes up to find that the meaning of words have changed.

It's impossible to change something completely overnight. The English language is an evolving beast, though, and it wouldn't surprise me to see some of what SS is pushing make it to the language. For example, l33t speak such as pwned! and pr0n have made it to common everyday usage. They will undoubtedly make it to Webster's at some point (if they haven't already). The texting phenomenon is also an interesting case, one I see quite often whenever my family sends me a message from Manila. You see Simplified Spelling in action, since you're trying to cram an entire message with a limited amount of letters, to wit: "m gng hm now. wil be hm soon. cya". It's only in text messaging though; their e-mails use regular, boring spelling.

So, for now I'll continue to live in the past, and revel in the fact that I once won the Spelling Bee (oh, and pray that Gaudere's Law doesn't come back to haunt me).