I can’t spell if my life depended on it. Of course, I used to read a lot when I was younger and most of the spelling words I know are just memorized, just like everyone else. I guess correctly at some words but I’m definitely the worst speller in my family.
When I was younger, and my family lived in Chicago (we live in the suburbs now), my father had this way of teaching me to spell. He used to tell me to memorize a couple of words every night and he used to test me on them the next night, a dictation of some sort. Then, he used to give me a whole new set of words, as well as the words I didn’t get right that night, and it was a continuous cycle every night; I hated it. It was a vicious cycle of me never knowing all the words.
There was this one specific word that still haunts me to this day, the word “foreign.” I never got it right. I used to spell it f-o-r-a-i-n every single time. And now, when I look back at it, I always think of the word foreign and it gives me this foreboding feeling as if I failed at something. I never spelled the word wrong again, so I guess I did learn from the experience.
As well as English, my dad als used to teach me mathematics. Now, I’m so thankful for it. I never had trouble with math like the other kids. I never hated math like so many people seem to.
Just like the word “foreign,” I had difficulty with a certain math number. I used to get 12 and 21 mixed up. I just remember feeling so disappointed for getting those wrong. It wasn’t like I got it wrong once. It was multiple times, over and over again, just like the word “foreign.”
It wasn’t as bad as I remember, but I was five or six years old and everything was big back then. Learning math made me so grateful, but the spelling didn’t have that big of an impact on me. I depend so heavily on autocorrect and I just wonder how the people without autocorrect have progressed in their time.
On the other hand, without it, I probably would’ve memorized more words by now or I wouldn’t have survived.