Dos Corect Speling mater?

I have always been a horrible speller, something I blame on my brainedness (although I'm not totally sure if its the left or right brained folks that are supposed to be good spellers)--but it is something that I still, in adulthood, work hard to correct. I'm still teaching myself tricks to fix the errors I've been making for decades (definitely is spelled with "finite" in the middle), and try to beat out my spellchecker to correcting my mistakes. But, I can totally understand the perspective that correct spelling might not actually matter. I mean, does the spelling matter if you get the message across? Should folks be judged for making spelling errors? Is it primitive of us to not really view English as a changing language? A recent article on time.com investigates this issue:

"Good spellers, Smith says, should be able to go on writing as usual; those who find the current rules of English too hard to learn should have their spelling labeled variant, not wrong. Smith zeroes in on 10 candidates for variant spellings, culled from his students' most commonly misspelled (or mispelled, as Smith suggests) words. Among them are Febuary instead of February, twelth instead of twelfth and truely instead of truly — all words, he says, that involve confusion over silent letters. When students would ask why there's no e in truly, Smith didn't really have an answer. "I'd say, 'Well, I don't know. ... You've just got to drop it because people do,' " he says. Smith adds that when teachers correct spelling, they waste valuable time they could be spending on bigger ideas. "

Should the English language be more flexible?

Check out the full article before you make your decision.