People who are good spellers are bad readers? And vice versa?

[Ima Stoodint]

My mother--in-law is practically obsessed with being better than me... She tells me that, because I'm good at spelling, she must be better at reading. I don't buy that. She says that it's because she has memorized the shapes of words and that I have to "sound them out" (which I most certainly do not! [in fact, I see her come to me and ask how to pronounce words more often than I stutter pronouncing words I've never seen]). I feel that a person's reading/spelling abilities are gained through repetition and practice - and through learning from one's mistakes... And I read a lot more than she does.

So I'm wondering... Is there any basis in reality for her choice of belief here? I've heard that people who are good at Algebra tend to be bad at Geometry, and vice versa, but I think that this is more of a cultural problem than a truth (i.e. people believe that they are going to do badly in one, therefore they "doom" themselves to do so). So how can she "know" that all good spellers read phonetically (I certainly don't for a good 99.9% of the time because I know the vast majority of words I come into contact with)? How can she "know" that she's "better" than me at reading simply because I can spell better than she can? It all sounds like a load of inferiority-complex-driven BS to me... With all due respect, of course.
Thank you I bit my tongue while she said it, despite being slightly offended by the assumption. It isn't worth making her worse, hehe

 

[tehabwa]

As a good speller, you realize that "sounding words out" simply doesn't work for a huge hunk of our vocabulary.

You're right, she's BS-ing. The fact that you can spell well does NOT mean that you read by sounding everything out. All good readers grasp most of what they read by recognizing whole words.

(When I clicked, I thought this was going to be about the good proof-reader's occupational hazard -- if you're good at proofing, you tend to see the typos that are everywhere, which distracts from reading-for-meaning.)

However, as a practical matter, your best bet is to agree with her pronouncements. Yes, she's being silly and petty, but what harm does it do you to pretend to be impressed?

That algebra/geometry thing has more to do with how people process -- more visually-oriented people would be better at geometry, because they naturally process that way. But not everyone good at one is bad at the other; many people are equally strong at various means of processing info.