Spelling, The IE Rule is just silly!

Oh, My. The erroneous things we are taught in school. How do we really learn to spell? That's what I'd like to know. I have been participating in the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee every morning, and I have learned a few things, like we spell a lot from memory about what the word looks like. Or we associate a root word with the bigger word, or we think, "Oh, that's a foreign word, so it has to be --ette, et, oux--(I can recognise some French bits, and maybe a couple of Spanish bits)." By far and away the "ie" rule has given me the biggest challenge (or ous, or tion, or ly, and ALL of their various ways to say the exact same sound--honestly there are not a lot of rules you can extrapolate that hold up). So frustrated, I looked up the "ie" rule--in Britain recently they begged teachers not to teach that rule any more--here goes:

"Just when a "rule" is learned, such as "I before E except after C" there are exceptions put in: "or when sounding like A as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'." Then, some aspiring novelist decides to put in a sentence like "Neither of the foreign sovereigns wanted either of the feisty heifers for protein, and they seized the weird kaleidoscope from the counterfeit poltergeist!" and the rule goes up in a puff of smoke.

"One of the best and most-overlooked techniques for learning both grammar and hard to spell words is simply reading – a wide variety and as much as possible. The more times the eye sees words spelled correctly, the more easy it is to spot mistakes. It becomes less a matter of following rules as much as gaining an intuition as to when a word simply feels "wrong.""