Maybe I’ll get over this when I’ve got more school-age children and less time.

I have this problem:  When the available curricula (at least for subjects I care about) are flawed, I start designing my own curricula from scratch.  This sucks up time that I might otherwise put to productive use, say, washing the dried food off the baby’s high chair.

Secretly, I like designing curriculum.  I think it is because I love office supplies.  And making lists.  And endlessly plan and organize.  AND I LIKE DOING THINGS MY WAY.  Mostly I want to get the stupid out of some of the curricula I buy.  Sometimes it’s good except for one thing that has to be changed or it’ll drive me crazy.

Take "Spelling Power."  (If you’ve not heard of it, you’ll just have to bear with me.)  Spelling Power has a lot going for it.  It’s cheap:  buy one book and that’s all you need.  It’s quick:  ten or fifteen minutes to a day’s spelling work.  It’s got a great algorithm:  pre-test a group of words; study only the misspelled words;  then the next day re-test those words, plus any words misspelled in the course of other writing, and pre-test a new batch.  Nice.  And it provides all the word lists you’ll need, arranged according to levels.

Except that I hate the word lists.  Some of them are matched with "spelling rules" that don’t fit them.  For example, here’s one comment attached to a group of words:  "The addition of a prefix does not usually change the spelling of the root word.  The prefix de can mean down or from."  The word list that follows contains 30 words — and only one of them is a word with the prefix de- attached to a root word in order to alter its meaning!  That word is "dehydrate."  (And even there, the "de-" connotes an undoing or an opposite, rather than "down" or "from.")  The rest of the words do all start with the two-letter combination "de", which etymologically indicates "down"-ness or "from"-ness in many cases, but they aren’t examples of a prefix added to a root word:

describes (related to scribes, but not in that way),

deposits (posits from?),

delight (anything to do with light?),

despite (spite?)

demand (and "mand" means what in English?)

delivered (maybe, if you’re explaining what happened to the organ donor!)

… and it goes on through debate, detective, devoted, defeat, decrease, deceit, decorator, debris, deprive, destructive, delinquent, demographic (which isn’t even remotely related since it comes from Greek demos!)… and even more.

So — I’m gonna make my own spelling lists.  This is a good starting point, but I can do better.