Dwelling on Spelling

 

I was a pretty good speller. But not the best in our classes in the Hiram Schools. We had one teacher, Mr. Peter Hamar, the science teacher, who somehow got assigned to teach us 8th grade English. He seemed ... befuddled by it all, and, as I recall, we did grammar and usage worksheets all week. I don’t remember reading a book for him—or writing a paper. But surely we did?

Every Friday, Mr. Hamar held a spelling bee in his class, and there were no surprises. The same kids were there near the end; the same kids sat down pretty quickly and talked about cars or sports the rest of period. Well ... whispered. Three or four good spellers would outlast me.

I observed the same phenomenon when I began teaching middle school English: The same kids won; the same kids departed early. I remember that the first year I taught, one of my students won the Portage County Spelling Bee. Lots of people congratulated me ... why? I had nothing to do with it!

I also discovered this: Good spelling wasn’t always associated with high intelligence. I had very bright kids who couldn’t spell well, some not-so-bright who could. It had to do, I later learned, with visual memory.

Dictionaries don’t help bad spellers. Often they have no idea where to begin searching. This came brutally clear to me when I had kids writing on computers (late in my career). Spell-check would offer a couple of options, and kids would often call me over and ask which choice they should make!

So I mostly worked on spelling in each kid’s written compositions. They would do revisions after I’d marked the papers, and that’s how I saw improvements.

True, I gave them ten vocabulary words to learn each week; spelling was part of it. But they could misspell all ten words (no one ever did) and still do okay on the quiz—they had to use them in sentences and so on. Not ideal, I know.

Back to Mr. Hamar ... we had English class in the science room, and he always wore a white lab coat. The periodic table was over the blackboard. In the back was an automobile engine. He had a vacuum bell jar and told us that if we put a frog in there and started pumping, the frog would explode.

Now that put some ideas in our sick heads. (Didn’t do it!)

But here’s what a couple of friends and I did do: Someone brought into school a toad he’d caught. We decided we would dissect it for extra science credit. So we subdued it (killed it) with a sedative, spread it out in the pan, pinned its extremities down, and proceeded to start removing things.

Lunchtime arrived. And down we headed to eat with our friends.

When we came back up, a startling sight greeted us: The toad was kicking at the pins that held it; its heart was pounding. We were shocked—but not too much to put it out of its misery.

Haven’t thought of that in years, thank God. Forgive me: I was 13.

Mr. Hamar was a wry, funny man. Maybe in his twenties? Thirties? We didn’t tell him what had happened with the toad. I think we got the extra credit.

And, by the way, I could spell dissect ... a lot of classmates couldn’t.