Outsmarted by a 3rd-grader

Today I taught 3rd-graders. I thought 3rd-graders were stupid, but I was wrong.

During the writing activity, I had about 15 kids in a queue for me to check their paragraphs. Most of them had about 50 mistakes per paragraph, and they had 3 paragraphs each, so I was in line to correct 15 x 50 x 3 = 2250 errors in a 20 minute reading activity! When I saw a kid was really good, I just wrote "good!" and moved on to the next kid. But then came Juli, an Asian kid with big, smiling eyes.

I wrote "good!" but she said, "I'm really worried about this word: smelt."

I asked her, "do you prefer British English or American English?"

She giggled and answered, "American English."

"Then the word is smelled," I said authoritatively. "You know, like: Jason farted, and I smelled it."

She giggled again and insisted: "But no! READ it!"

I read it and she was writing about the Bronze Age--how people started to melt metals, about smelting! Of course, she was writing in the past tense, so she needed to know: what is the simple past participle of smelt?

"I don't know, Juli," I told her. "I think either smelt or smelted is acceptable. It's one of those funny English words where the past participle can be the same as the present tense. For example: read. Today, I read a book. But yesterday I read it!"

I still don't know. Damn it! I hate getting outsmarted by a 3rd-grader!