It’s not just in the teaching of reading where public schools are now floundering but likewise in imparting the related skills of writing and spelling and in this case, educators tag the curriculum as the culprit.
A Grade 6 public school teacher in a Cordillera division noticed that for some years now, nearly half her class had not learned to write the alphabet and numbers in the standard way with the letters “f,” “d” and “q” as the most wrongly written.
She said that the common thinking among today’s pupils seems to be how they write letters does not matter provided that the result resembles the letter thus some begin at the wrong point or would create the letter using more strokes than necessary.
She recalled that while teaching in Grades 2 and 3 back in the 90s, it was only the slow learners she used to help with their handwriting.
“These are not slow learners. They simply had not mastered writing the alphabet in the right way. They do not follow any rules,” she said.
A high school teacher in Region 1 told this correspondent the sight of the written work of students makes her blood pressure shoot up because some could not even execute the correct form of letter “a,” the sentences begin in the lower case and rules on margins and indention are ignored “on top of wrong grammar and spelling.”
Saying that she started noticing the degeneration of the handwriting of pupils around a decade ago, a Region 1 elementary school head teacher laments: “There are those who write completely in bold letters. They do not know proper use of capital letters. They do not know cursive. Some are even lazy to write their surname.”
Cursive on the way out?
Namnama Lumines who retired from the Department of Education (DepEd) as district supervisor in 2011 said she has yet to hear any change to the old rule requiring school children to write in the cursive starting in Grade 2 and is thus puzzled how come most public school children write in block letters.
This correspondent learned from a source at the Tabuk City National High School (TCNHS) that only 20 percent of their Grade 7 students coming from public school write in cursive as compared to the 90 percent a decade back.
Tabuk City Central School (TCCS) Principal Juliana Javillonar also informed that not all their Grade 6 pupils could write in cursive.
Theme writing
The downgrading of theme writing as an activity in the elementary schools is tagged as one of the causes of the declining writing and spelling competence of school children.
Javillonar said that theme writing under the K-12 curriculum starts in Grade 3 but these are informal and, according to the learning competencies, composed of only two to three sentences thus loose leaves are used instead of the formal theme books used in the old curricula. She added that the pupils could pick their own topics.
Lumines also said that in the old curriculum, Grade 2 pupils were made to write informal theme up to three sentences for purposes of teaching content, mechanics of writing and organization and apart from the four formal themes, teachers could require as many informal pieces as she felt needed.
She said that based on her analysis of the K-12 curriculum for Grade 4 English, there is not enough time budget to develop the skills sought to be taught in traditional theme writing so that the purpose appears just to write the acquired knowledge about the lesson taken during the period.
“It is no longer like before when theme writing was a separate lesson with steps e.g. oral composition or pre-writing activity where pupils learn the words and phrases to be used in the theme, drafting, revision, editing and formal writing,” Lumines said.
She also said there are some Grade 4 teachers who understand the objective “To be able to write a four-sentence paragraph” literally and do not take it as having several paragraphs with at least one paragraph containing four or more sentences.
Shown a sample Grade 4 theme, Lumines declared:“No indention, no period, not cursive. In writing performance, the writer is Grade 2 level compared to pupils during our time.”
She, however, commented that despite their disregard of writing mechanics, faulty organization, spelling and the grammar, today’s school children still have good ideas and content
Spelling
Sometime in March, a high school principal in a Cordillera province posted on Facebook the final test paper of a Grade 7 pupil with the answers in block letters with no attempt to keep lines straight and the size of the letters uniform.
The term “air pollution” was written as “elpolyoshun,” erosion ad “iroshon,” “flood” as “plad” and “die” as “day.”
Maintaining that the student is not a special child as she mingles normally with other kids, he told this correspondent that there are more in the batch who misspell even simple words and at least three who have reading difficulties.
When shown the specimen, Lumines commented that many students these days spell words as they pronounce it “which is an effect of the Mother Tongue policy.”
A public school Grade 7 teacher in Region 5 told this correspondent through Messenger that generally speaking, the pencraft of their students are not appropriate for high school students specially those belonging to the reading class. They also have virtually inexistent spelling skills.
Photos of the English spelling quiz papers of four students from the reading class sent by the teacher showed the students are apparently applying the Filipino spelling rule of spelling words as they sound when three of them wrote the word “sleep” as “eslief,” “isli” and “eslip” and the word “away” as “awie,” “awii” and “awe.”
The fourth student who is an obvious non-reader merely wrote meaningless jumble of letters.
Lumines said that that the practice in public schools while was still teaching back in the 70s to the 90s, 10 minutes were spent for writing and another 10 minutes for spelling from Grade 1 to 6. Part of the activity was for the pupils to use the words in sentences.
She said spelling in English is in the curriculum starting from Grade 3 which is two years later than in the old curriculum adding that one other setback is that teachers these days are overloaded and cannot focus.
The retired educator said despite their circumstances teachers should not hesitate to deviate from the curriculum guide and formulate their own objectives to help pupils spelling competency.
The Cordillera Grade 6 teacher earlier quoted informed that before the implementation of the K-12 curriculum, an average of only two of her Grade 6 pupils failed the spelling post-test she gave on Fridays but these days, majority of the class fail the drill.
And that’s even if she no longer gives words with silent letters these days.
She says that she is not even certain if the class will perfect the spelling exercises if the words are Grade 3 level.
The teacher connects the phenomenon with the inability of some of her pupils to read saying this is so obvious during the oral spelling activity when some of them introduce the sound of letters that are not in the word.**Estanislao Albano, Jr.(To be continued)
