Is spelling a lost art?

Why can't she spell?

I was completely shocked this week by a colleague who couldn't spell. She is an intelligent, capable girl in her early twenties, but when, during a team training event, she took over the role of writing down the group's thoughts on a large sheet of paper, we discovered she couldn't spell.

Not even slightly.

The words she had to have spelled out for her included; 'communicate', 'relationship', and 'development'.

I must admit to being shocked. I have always assumed, possibly naively, that everyone that's gone through the school system and is working in a pretty good job can read and write, and when I say write, I also mean spell.

Remember in school when there was a weekly spelling test alongside the weekly times-table test? My daughters now come home with pretty much the same homework as I did 35 years ago... Spellings and Tables.

The theory is presumably that if you know your tables off by heart, other mental arithmetic is invariably easier and you'll find passing tests, counting change (when using cash on those rare occasions these days) and working out how much you'll pay back in interest if you borrow money for a car, an awful lot more manageable. And let's be honest; when someone calculates something in their heads quickly we are all impressed.

They are that little bit sexier as a result. Or is that just me?