Lol, 'teh' hero. While p=vowel is kinda retarded (to say the least), couldn't the extra 'and' between 'you' and 'can' have just been a typo?

"after which teh hero" - Come on Obi. You can't bitch about a teacher's typo and have one of your own.

It could have...probably was...

But still--when you're proposing the kid learn grammar by write a sentence BACKWARDS...you should, yourself, be required to type it out correctly fowards yourself.

(Yeah, the "th" sound was another one he had trouble with, that and "ch" and "ion," so yes, largehapm, DON'T LAUGH...

If P is now a vowel, then teh way you now spell "teh" is by placing teh h after teh e in teh, OK?)

@Draug:

1. *I* am not a certified teacher...
2. *I* didn't tell a kid to spell the word backwards
3. See the response to largeham--if P is a vowel, than teh is now an acceptable spelling.

;)

(And I KNEW someone was going to say that on my first typo! LOL)

And apparently "than" is an Ok standin for "then," too...my brain is melted, I need a nap to recuperate from this...2 hours of telling a 9-year old kid what sound "i" makes has me tired.

The word in the second paragraph should have been "writing" not "write" and using "yourself" twice is redundant and questionable, grammatically speaking.

Are you serious? However, I wouldn't jump to any conclusions based on this one experience. That said, this is kinda nuts.

Again, fair enough, Draug, but I'm not a teacher of grammar, don't claim to be, I'm off hours, and I'm TIRED after a 12-hour day, half in classes and whatnot and half in transit or tutoring this kid...

So be nice...or I'll start busting out the Chaucer-style spellings, and we'll REALLY start to have fun with the spellcheck! :)

@largeham:

I don't blame the KID...for his part, he certainly seemed like he was trying and not stupid or anything, I blame whoever came up with those stupid "spelling menu" ideas on his sheet for learning grammar and spelling, but never, in their fun, stopped to say "hey, maybe we should actually focus on the subject instead of these half-baked little word games."

I dunno, when I was in school--11, 12 years or so I was about his grade, so it's not that long ago--*I* don't remember this crap being taught like this...

The only one I sort of recognized was the "spelling pyramid," such as:

c
ca
cat

Which is pointless, yeah, in my opinion, always thought it was stupid, but at least it doesn't do any harm...

The kid was mixing up the order of his letters SO much I really think that "write it backwards" crap has him confused...

To say nothing of WHERE he got the idea P was a vowel and that it says its own name in the sentence.

Well, by that logic, T and V are also vowels and "say their names" and U is not a vowel as it's is pronounced "you" not "oo". And I was just busting your chops for fun, Obi.

"T" and "V" say their names?

How?

"T" in a sentence never says "tee," it's always "t."

Same with "V," it never says "vee," but "v."

And eh, "you/oo" is close enough to make the point, I suppose...

I dunno, just repeating what I was taught way back when...I asked professors, and none knew how to teach a 9-year old, they all got to just jump right into high school or college, where at least there are books to be read and analyzed and pontificated about until someone realizes they need to get a real job... ;)

My point exactly. If P (pronounced pea) says it's name then T and V do too.

No, I mean, the sound it MAKES, not the pronunciation of the letter itself...

After all, if that were true, ALL the letters would "say their names."

B would be "Bee," not the "b" sound...D would be "Dee" not "d" and so on.

But you pronounce a long vowel sound--at least in some variation, and sometimes--by giving the name of the vowel, ie, "same," the "s" sound isn't "Es," so that's not saying it's name, but the "a" is...



I know it's a rough analogy, but again, it's meant for 1st-2nd graders--that's when I ehard it--so I just used it with the kid, it's not meant to be analyzed this much, lol.

I was being sarcastic. I knew what you meant. I meant by the 4th grader's logic that made 'P' a vowel, 'T', 'D', 'V', 'B', 'J', 'K', and 'Z' woudl all be vowels because they start with their sounds. It's poking fun at whoever taught the kid that 'P' was a vowel.

Oh, and 'C' never says it's name, nor does 'G' in the classic sense. They both use the soft version of themselves in their pronunciations.

"2 hours of telling a 9-year old kid what sound "i" makes has me tired. "

Its funny because it seems like you have always loved that letter and the sound it makes.

Cedar

Gino

@Santa +1

LOL!

Like I said, the soft versions of their names as opposed to the hard vewrsions like C*nt and Gasbag. Sorry, had to be a bit obscene and rude there. It just screemed out for it.

I tell my developmental college students "It's not your fault; it's English!" because our sound system is soooo different from our spelling system. We have ten vowel phonemes, for example (and some dialects have 11), but only five vowel letters, plus 'y' and (in Welsh) 'w.' A phoneme is a vowel "sound" that is distinguished as separate from other vowel sounds and that changes the meaning of a word, like "bat" and "but" and "bought" and "boat" and "boot" and "bit" and "bait" and "bet" and "beat" and... Ok so we only have nine in that particular arrangement--There is no word that starts with 'b' and ends with 't' and has the "u" sound of the 'oo' in book, and the vowel sounds in "bite" and "beaut" are diphthongs.

Not only that, but English has this *ahem* cool feature where many of the vowels are pronounced differently when they are unstressed than when they are stressed. "I ordered a bagel" is different from "I ordered A bagel; please take this extra one back" in that the article "a" is pronounced "uh" in the first sentence and "ay" in the second sentence just because it is stressed.

Plus 24 consonant sounds, including two that are typically spelled "th": The voiced sound in "this" and the voiceless sound in "think."

You forgot bite.

Oh, you didn't forget it, but it isn't a dipthong. Bite is like kite or write. It's a long i not a dipthong.

And Obi, make sure to get the kid tested (by experts, at school, free) for dyslexia/related disabilities--mixing up letters is a prime indication. And tell him that Picasso and Edison had severe learning disabilities.

And the teacher may have had him spelling backwards for just that reason. It can help when they have to concentrate on the reverse spelling if they are dyslexic.

Draugnar, what you call a "long i" is actually a diphthong because it starts with "ah" and moves to "ee." Anyway, the expression "long vowel" is a clumsy mechanism that English grammarians borrowed from Germanic languages to differentiate between the different sounds that are commonly represented by a single vowel, such as the "short" /I/ in bit and the "long" /ai/ or /ay/ in 'bite'... but in German, for example, the length of a vowel sound IS phonemic. If you say "sad" or "saaaaaad" it's still considered the same sound in English, but German "Stadt" (city) and "Staat" (state) are pronounced exactly the same except for the length of the "ah" sound in them, and that difference in length changes the meaning of the word.

And the letter 'u' does sometimes say its own name: the word 'usual' has two instances of it.

Obi, thinking back, how much did you get out of school? In high school the only classes I learned much in were foreign language, history, sociology, geography, and... that's about it.