Spelling. We all have to do it on a regular basis, yet when we make errors, the results can be hilarious.

For example, today I received a make-up assignment where a student was allowed to just write about whatever came to her. It was just a simple, easy, small point assignment, but it also kept her from an F in the class. On the paper was this: "I believe that abortion should not be illegal, because it is important to have in case a girl gets rapped."

Rapped.

Maybe it was the combination of the serious subject matter and the mental image of someone rapping over a woman to induce an abortion, but I just started laughing. In the middle of class.

Over the years, I have seen some very creative spellings, and every time I correct a student on it, they ask me that all important question: "Why is spelling so important? I mean, we have spell check!"

Apart from the obvious fact that spell check doesn't get every error, especially words that you spelled correctly technically but used incorrectly, the simple fact is that most of our work is handwritten, and every time I see a misspelled word, one of my brain cells dies.

I also learned that apparently life during WWII was "ruff." I didn't know they had a bunch of dogs walking around barking at them at the time, that really must have sucked.

So, is spelling important? It's a fairly subjective question. As an English teacher, my response would of course be yes, but ask any 17 year old and you'll get a different answer. Yet, when I worked retail, I would often help my manager go through the applications from prospective employees. The ones who had horrifying spelling and grammar errors were automatically sent to the bottom of the pile. Not that you really need to know how to spell in order to fold shirts and hock store credit cards, but I certainly didn't want to know or associate with those people. God forbid one of these children pull someone like me as their potential employer.

In my opinion, spelling is just something you should be relatively good at in order to be a functioning person. Like knowing when our country was founded or what colors are on traffic lights. Or how to add or subtract, which I am told by my math cohorts is also a dying skill amongst today's up-and-coming citizens. I don't expect them to know how to spell difficult words, especially without the help of a phonics background (which is another rant for another day), and I would never chastise someone for misspelling a word like "onomatopoeia."

The bottom line is that if you make a hilarious spelling error in my class, I am going to call you out on it, quite possibly in front of everyone. And they will laugh, knowing full well that they probably would have made the same error. Sometimes it backfires, as was the case with the student who's p's look like f's. Imagine the hilarity the first time I read his writing to myself. What a haffy day that was, until I realized he really did know the difference between the two, he was just incapable of making them look different in his handwriting. But most of the time, the kid will remember how to spell that word.