Spelling
v Out of Tuneness
This is in response to a TES article October 2015.
As a seven-year old aspiring musician I was told by my class
teacher that I was singing out of tune, and that, far from playing the Duchess at
the summer concert, I was now not even allowed to be in it. Me, Dermott Mackie
[his name sticks in my head after all these years] and one other boy – all out.
Devastated, crushed beyond belief, by being denied this form of expression, and excluded from the party, I
continued mechanically with piano lessons for another 8 years, but, for creative
expression and self-belief I turned to English – language and literature.
My next form teacher at Silver Street Primary, Drakes Cross,
nr Birmingham was Mr Parker; he said I could be the next George Elliott. I had
no idea who he [!] was, but I knew this a compliment. I blossomed under his
care, and st about learning by heart all of The Burial
of Sir John Moore after Corunna. [“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note
. . “] which he made me recite , one verse at a time every Friday morning, to the rest of the class; moreover he obviously got the
class to listen to me.
We, as a family, suddenly moved from the countryside in the Midlands to inner-city Leeds
before I got to Verse Five. I never did learn any more of how Sir John was laid
to rest, but I did correspond with Mr Parker for a couple of years after that.
I devoted a couple of decades to being good at English, one
of them as an English teacher. I was a naturally good speller, and am still
easily upset at “seperate” and “definate” and other such abominations. Initially I fell for the old justification that correct spelling would help in
some way with understanding and derivation [had spent four very happy years studying Latin]. But as an English teacher at Foxwood School, I
watched too many children struggling with spelling, and as a mother,
suffered alongside Daisy as she experienced her dyslexia.
Doing Languages at Uni I contemplated the great consonants
shifts, read about the standardisation of the English spelling. Studying
other foreign languages, generally phonetic, I realised that English spelling wasn't
scientific law of nature, but a person-made barrier to communication.
A happy and rather wonderful accident occasioned my rebirth as a music teacher, and I was so lucky to have this second chance. But I still loved words and literature, and I still cared.
Words on the page are really only spoken words written down,
just as musical notation is only a way to know, help remember or learn the
sounds.
 |
| Daisy & Alice at Leeds Corn Exchange |
When I, so surprisingly, re-entered the world of music; trained myself
to teach music, I met loads of people who couldn’t handle out-of-tuneness,
especially on my soon-to-be new chosen instrument – steelpans. And now after a
decade or so, I can’t handle it either. However, I still can’t stand misspelt words but I
know it’s almost an affectation. And the more I engage with textspeak the more
liberated I feel.
The moral of this story is several. Here’s two:
1. No child should ever have their musical future destroyed
by being out of tune early on.
2. "Correct" spelling is not important. Full stop. No child should be denied their academic future because of dyslexia or anything of that sort. [Daisy went on to get her degree twenty years after she left school, where she had been rubbished by snobbish academia].
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