Red rag - meet the bull!!

In more ways than one.

I mean - WTF?? Bad spelling "should be accepted."

WHAT??

This twat from Bucks New University (so they're not from a "real" Uni, then) says that the ten most commonly mis-spelt words should be treated as "variant spellings" and not marked as incorrect.

He has arrived at this conclusion after years of marking papers and correcting the same mistakes over and over again.

And THIS is his solution? Instead of teaching the kids to bloody spell, we just let them go their own merry way without correcting them? So what happens when the ten most commonly misspelt words becomes twenty? And thirty? And a hundred?

Thank God for the voice of reason in The Times, in which the columnist says:

Students are now incapable of learning the spellings of “their” and “truly” that countless millions have mastered over the centuries. So let's change our attitudes to spelling to help this deserving minority.

Abso-bloody-lutely.

I'm sorry if any of you out there have trouble spelling - but this (unsurprisingly) makes my blood boil.

I've said this before, but I was appalled when, in my training year, I set my first piece of homework and was told when marking it to be lenient on things like spelling. Because the content was more important overall.

But if a kid has produced something that's badly spelt and constructed, it won't matter if it's full of good ideas if you can't understand it!

Does this mean that 2+2 can now equal 5, because there are some people out there who have trouble adding up?