E-u-n-u-c-h-s

The Edelschick girls are notoriously bad spellers. My sister Brenda is the worst.  When she was a kid, the only person who could read her notes and cards was my grandfather, who was probably the worst speller of all time – they had some kind of wheerd cunxun.

I’m not as bad as Brenda, but I’m a really, really bad speller.  And since I don’t like thinking of myself as being bad at anything that matters, I long ago decided that spelling prowess was an unnecessary skill, and that pursuing it was a waste of time.

Thus, it never made it onto our weekly schedule.  And of my ridiculously long list of objectives, only one even mentions spelling; Number 4 under Writing states Know spelling of sight words.

But I started thinking last month that Ezra, who is still struggling a bit as a reader, might benefit from some explicit spelling instruction.  (I’m sure that all of the elementary teachers are rolling their eyes and saying things like, “Duh.  We don’t just teach things for the heck of it.  We actually know what we are doing.”)

Anyway, I bought Ezra the Hooked on Spelling program, and he LOVES it.  After he finishes a unit, he stands tall and spells sit and pot like he’s in the national spelling bee.

For Zach, I have been making his weekly spelling word lists from a book I have, along with words that he spells incorrectly when writing.  Hence, this week’s list:

1. said
2. buried
3. play
4. people
5. teacher
6. confession
7. school
8. emperor
9. eunuchs
10. little

Can you tell which five words came from a standard spelling list and which came from his three-line report on the movie The Last Emperor?  Can you guess which two I spelled incorrectly when I was “correcting” his paper?

If you are worried about me letting the kids watch such a grown-up movie, you should know that I skipped over a few scenes while Ezra announced, “People are dressed inappropriately in this part, right Momma?”

“Uh, yeah, Ez.  Inappropriate clothing is one way to describe this scene.”

Normally, I would just say that we were skipping the scene because it was showing people having sex, which is too private for us to see.  But I decided not to explain that this scene showed the emperor having sex with both of his wives simultaneously.

Skipping the sex scenes didn’t stop the boys from engaging in plenty of private-parts talk , though.  The boys were fascinated by the eunuchs.  Hence, one of Zach’s three sentences about the nearly three-hour-long movie:

The unichs got barrried with their testicles.

Which wasn’t even in the movie.  All that we saw were the eunuchs walking out of the Forbidden City with their bao, or treasure (their testicles in jars), so that when they died they could be buried as “whole men.”

“Oh well,” I thought, “he may still not have the best story recollection, but at least he spelled testicles correctly.”

It’s always such a gratifying feeling when you realize that your children will surpass your abilities in something.

Too bad, though, that it’s in a such a waste of time as spelling.