I was responsible for scoring seventh grade essays and was later "promoted" to eighth grade. One of the stories they had to write about was about a deaf girl, "Ronnie" who makes friends with another girl "Linda". I wanted to write this time about the spelling abilities of US middle-schoolers. Now I am the absolute last person who should be judging others based on spelling, and I fully acknowledge that spelling ability does not directly correlate with intelligence; however, I think that the following is still a sad commentary on the state of our educational system. The following are all real spellings of the word "deaf", commonly used in the passage that the students read. Note that almost all of these were used several times by different kids. Some of the spelling were reasonable: Deaff, Def, Deph, Deaph, Deff Some less so: Defh, Deafh, Deafy, Defth Some out and out strange: Deap, Draf, Dieth, Deuf, Bife, Beaf, Depth, Dear, Deft, Dewf, Dweef And then: Deth, Death, Dead Seriously. "Death" was particularly common. ...all used as if they spelled Deaf. For example, one student was writing about how a deaf person would talk in sign language with their hands (what she called hand-to-hand communication) and wouldn't understand when others spoke with with their mouths. This is what she wrote (remembering that last mis-spelling): "Mouth-to-mouth doesn't work on the dead." Pure wisdom. | 
