Spelling Rule Doubled Consonant

My 6th grader came home with this mouthful of a spelling rule that correctly predicts whether the last consonant gets doubled before adding "ing" in English. I'd never been able to figure out whether to write "focussing" or "focusing", or "modelling" or "modeling" before. Thank goodness for the remedial education that comes from sending kids to school. (He had to memorize it and replay it on a test. It took us 5 minutes to decipher it.)

Did your kid receive credit in the test for being able to regurgitate a rule he did not understand? (Yes - even after we dissected it and he could regenerate it both ways, he still can't parse it... but they drilled enough he actually spells these things correctly. Question as to whether it was rule or drills or rule plus drills that did it).

Rule 3: "When there's a short vowel before the last consonant and the accent is on the last syllable, double the consonant when adding a suffix that begins with a vowel."

Rule 4: "If the accent changes, don't double it."

Loosely translated, means that "Modelling" would be pronounced Mo-del'-ling, whereas we want Mo'-de-ling. So don't double the consonant if you want the accent to stay on the first syllable.

If only I'd done my 6th grade in the US I'd never have created WikiNames with such a nasty Smelling PissTake as ImpactModelling and ModellingTrap. Sorry.

That's ok, you'd still spell "colour" wrong. ;)

Shouldn't that be 'That's ok, you'd still spell "colour" incorrectly'?

The sad fact is that we British are the inconsistent ones - to the detriment of children and those for whom English is not mother tongue. (And am I right in saying that Spanish, not English, is largest mother tongue of all languages globally, once China's languages are separated out reasonably fairly? And not Sanskrit? Or do you mean living mother tongues of living languages? Yep, number of people living whose first language is Spanish)

We try and justify our genius through Shakspeer (and however else he spelt it) but the fact the Bard was dyslexic isn't really a good enough reason.

Is not that the first printed books in English were produced at a time when the language was going through a major upheaval, and so "fixed" a number of (what would have been) transitional forms? and that's what they'll say about software one day I guess...

A friend once told me about the following exchange (which needs to be written partly fonetically) which illustrates the point pretty well:

American presenter: "So that's our skedule for today."

British man in audience: "Excuse me, don't you mean shedule?"

American presenter: "It all depends what shool you went to."

So how is schadenfreude pronounced in America?

"SHAH den froy duh"