There, their - is there a better way to do it?

I came up the old-fashioned way.  Our writing had to follow the rules of grammar, be spelled correctly and it was even allowed to be interesting.  Now, far be it from me to say that I knew then and can remember now all the intricacies of English grammer as it was taught back in the late 1950s.  I find myself slipping into the modern day slang and, when I'm typing out an article, my spelling can go completely adrift.  I don't always catch these mistakes and then, months later, re-reading can give me some quite serious heartburn.

Is it really my imagination or have people lost the notion that grammatical writing can be good?  It certainly seems that efforts to spell correctly have gone by the wayside.  One of my pet hates is when folks can't figure their way out of the "there/their/they're" debate.  I can remember one of my teachers going through the rules, the descriptions and the examples over and over again until our class really got it.

They're going to put their school books over there.

There remains the question, "So, what was so difficult about that?"