Poor spellers, lousy teachers

Ken Smith may be only a teacher of criminology, but his ideas are truly criminal:

Fed up with his students' complete inability to spell common English correctly, a British academic has suggested it may be time to accept "variant spellings" as legitimate.

Rather than grammarians getting in a huff about "argument" being spelled "arguement" or "opportunity" as "opertunity," why not accept anything that's phonetically (fonetickly?) correct as long as it can be understood?

"Teaching a large first-year course at a British university, I am fed up with correcting my students' atrocious spelling," Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

This is absolutely the wrong thing to do. Besides, as John Simpson, the chief editor of the Oxford Dictionary, explains, rules are there for a reason, and he does not agree with accommodating university students' poor spelling skills because, according to him, they should have learned how to spell by the time they reach university.

This sad story also proves something I have been saying all along: As a society, we're constantly giving in to perversion in all aspects of life, with normalcy being marginalized more and more all the time.

I know, though, what really motivates Smith. He is a lazy and lousy teacher who doesn't want to do the work he's paid for. By accepting bad spelling and not marking papers accordingly, he wants to take a shortcut bypassing his duties as an educator. That is the real reason.