endless repetition

I'm not actually completely sure how common this practice is, but a staple feature of my American primary school career was spelling as an academic subject. I don't really recall doing anything like that in England, since I guess we were all expected to learn how to spell words properly on our own just from learning to read them or something. Though I distinctly remember teachers giving all of us a simple handmade 'book' (comprised of sheets of paper folded in half to make the leaves and 'covered' with colour construction paper) which we were instructed to have a teacher or aide write any words we didn't know how to spell. The intention was probably to give us a crude reference book to look up and learn the spellings of words we had trouble spelling.

American schools, or at least the ones I'm aware of, do things differently. They assign students to groups based on their proficiency in language comprehension (I was usually in the highest or second-highest group) and each week each group was presented with a sheet of paper with ten to twenty different words we were supposed to learn. I don't know if this was a school-wide mandate or part of a county or state curriculum or what, but every single week for every single year, teachers gave us exactly the same homework to do with our spelling words. It was so completely repetitious that I remember it even to this day. On Monday we were to write each word three times; Tuesday we were to put them in alphabetical order; on Wednesday we were to use each word in a sentence. Spelling tests were every Friday, so on Thursday we were instructed to study our words even though I never actually did it. At some point I figured out that if I wrote each word three times in alphabetical order, I could kill two birds with one stone and take care of Tuesday's homework on Monday afternoon. (The teachers usually accepted this without hesitation. I'm not sure why, but I guess in the long run it didn't really matter.) There probably isn't anything wrong with this system since obviously I successfully learned how to spell although I gather from all the infuriatingly unreadable Facebook and internet forum posts I've read over the years that I'm in the minority.

I don't know why I wanted to talk about this. It doesn't mean anything to anyone at all, including me.