Those kind of mistakes irritate me. But I've learned some very gifted people are still very poor spellers. Take a deep breath and let it out slowly; then watch how things progress in her classroom.

I do admit that some mistakes by my elementary teachers have remained in my memory. I still remember a substitute 4th grade teacher trying to tell us 4 divided by 0 was 4. She didn't believe me that you can't divide by 0 until we went through 4/2 & 4/1, she was still a bit puzzled by the whole thing. So, I think it's a bigger problem when the kid starts finding the teacher's mistakes, and how it's handled then can make a difference in the child's attitude toward teachers & school.

Keep in mind too that classroom aides are typically VERY low paid, low qualifications, etc. In our district we have lots of "retired" professional moms in those rolls, and many are actually highly educated. But we also have some at the other extreme. The job pays < $9.00/hour. Most are VERY good kid people, etc....but not always the sharpest tools in the shed.

My point here is that they often do some of the "grunt" work for the teachers, as do parent volunteers. I know I've graded quite a few papers myself. I use my spelling example all the time, but I truly loved the teachers she had that year, and highly suspect one of the other possibilities for the "your the best" paper.

Sadly, all the mistakes we got came from the teachers themselves. They were in their handwriting or were in a lengthy, typed "beginning of school" note, with no aides at all and no volunteers in the classroom yet.

I just chalk it up to par for the course. Hopefully it means that they're "go with the flow" types of people, flexible, not sticklers for rules that don't matter, right? Optimism!

(That held true for two of the 4 teachers DS7 had, so there's hope that that's what it means...)

Aww, your all the best! Thanks for listening to me whine. I was just ... ugh. Not the best way to start the year! It was definitely from the teacher herself -- there are no aides at the new school, KG's only got 14 kids in his class.

Optimism!