Ep 42: Ooooh, aaaaah

Ooooh, I feel like a princess. Why? Because yesterday I went to a festival. There was food, dancing, and fun sights...and I'm going to need to go through my pictures before I write anything else about it.

Other than that there's really not much for me to talk about. I'm trying a new food tonight (pictures as well). A few months ago, I started to get big cravings for grilled cheese sandwiches, but I think that I might be overdoing it. So, tonight I decided to do something fun. I started by mashing an avocado upon one piece of bread. Then, I added the cheese. On top of the cheese, I added some fresh tomato slices. Then, to top it all off, I added another piece of bread with a little butter on one side and some peanut butter on the other side. Then I grilled it up, heated up some tomato soup, and voila: a delicious (and filling) sandwich. Yum.
So, I've been thinking about the English language. Specifically, spelling. English spelling is, to put it bluntly, like a group of three year-olds at a type writer. This causes problems for everyone, from natives to learners. So, what could the changes be? Simple, we could make it more phonetic. That fact, however, can cause problems. For one, it can be a lidl hard to understand. Smal werdz look difrent and sum werdz ar speld difrent. Anther issue is that pronunciation varies by region, so any change to spelling would naturally favor one region over anther and, inevitably, would lead to a rather large number of potential spellings of words, destroying the hard work of Webster and the like in the 19th century. Lastly, in terms of comprehension, spellings can do a great job of showing us the difference between homonyms. Take, for example, principle and principal. "The principal's new principle was about stealing. I like the principle." From this example, we can easily tell that the person in question likes the policy. However, if they were spelled the same by a set of rules, "the principle's new principle was about stealing. I like the principle." We have no idea if the speaker in question likes the new policy, or is considering something else. With all of this in mind, while I am sure that English would be easier to learn if, you know, it actually had rules with fewer exceptions than examples (looking at you, "I before E"), it might make it a bit harder to understand.

In terms of weird and funny stories for the week:
In one of my classes, one of the students drew a fetus on the board, and said that it was another student. Middle School students come up with the weirdest insults. Anyway, I realized that I would never get another opportunity like this, so I taught them the word fetus. How could I not?