Reading, Writing and…Spelling?

When I was in first grade I remember learning the rules of the alphabet, in between picking my nose, teasing my class mates and raising my hand saying "pick me pick me!" Remember the one "i before e except after c ?" BTW, that rule only applies to digraphs, so words like "deity" and "science" don't count. It doesn't apply to the large number of plurals of words ending in "cy" ("fallacies", "frequencies", "vacancies", bla bla BLA BLA! And then there was phonics which was supposed to help me "understand the relationships between written letters and spoken sounds." Say what? Why can't we just spell it Fonnix? That does look weird. So this morning I found this on Fox News. The picture speaks for its self.