Is Spelling Really Important?

I once had a small cohort of new teachers to train and since all were fairly tech-savvy, the training moved quickly. The training tempo allowed for far more visiting and exchange of ideas than usual, and with that exchange came some interesting things to ponder.

One of the 4 teachers shared that she has never lived at a time that spell checkers weren't readily available and used. She remarked that whenever she prepared a document for any class, at any grade, the auto-check button took care of the majority of errors. Had she not been an English major, things like "i before e except after c" might have not even been relevant or worthy of memorization since auto-check swapped the letters correctly when needed. And of course, acceptance of texting shorthand was also just a given. You could tell the age or era of the person by whether it annoyed them to purposely shorten words or spell them visually.

Virtual education is here to stay, but I sometimes wonder what explorers and visitors from other galaxies might say someday as they find the demise or serious alteration of our language. I do find myself fitting right into the new age - I no longer mumble under my breath about people who can't spell, but rather about people who don't use spell check. Errors can go under the radar when a writer begins to program their own software dictionaries to accept shorthand designations. If "luvu2" works and is marked to go through, who would know it wasn't correct?

I want it all. I want the ease and portability of the Internet and computer programs, but I need to feel people are still engaged in the fundamentals. I know in the extreme people can honestly sit across from one another and text rather than talk, but no matter how much we manage to reduce face-to-face interaction, we still need to be educated behind the scenes. We still need to conceptualize, create, compose, craft....well, a human being isn't meant to just "be" and let machines do it all. I hope we know when to put on those brakes.