Clay the Rambling Homeschooling Dad

I Brought a Bough Through the Rough weather

I'm homeschooling and I'm faced with a dilemma. First a little pat on my own back: I was the number 8 speller in the entire State of Texas in 1981, when a sophomore. So, I'm gifted with spelling. I rarely have to look up words. Now that I'm teaching, I need to teach my daughter how to do that.

How, then, does one who never had to do something, teach it? I say, "Sound it out," and she does. And she comes up with something that is completely wrong.

Not a problem! Let's look it up in the dictionary, and let's use the title sentence as an example. You'll notice first that the English language - for lack of a better term - stinks. Yeah, everyone in the world speaks it, but few know the intricacies of the language. How many people know that some group - somewhere - keeps changing the rules for writing! I'm convinced that the only reason for the changes is so they can sell more books. Ya know, nobody will buy a 'revised edition' if nothing's been revised. So all these old farts sit around saying, "We'll make it 'normal' for a list of words to have a comma after every entry, except before the word 'and'." A few years later, they need to buy a new Lexus, so they put out a new book. "Let's make it 'normal' to put the comma before the 'and' in a list." And they publish a new book.

So, anyway - you have this series of letters: o-u-g-h. In any other language (Spanish, French, German, etc.) that series of letters would have a standard sound. Well, in English, they don't. It all depends on which word those letters are used.

• Brought - brot
• Bough - bow
• Through - threw
• Rough - ruff

Why would anyone accept these spellings for these various sounds? Notice that only the word Rough has the 'f' sound at the end, like laugh. You can't assign a rule for that, because - with the exception of the 'th' at the beginning - Through is spelled exactly like Rough. It's also identical to the middle of Brought. How can one teach this? Identical spelling, different sounds.

Read and Read is a worse example. The words are identically spelled. But if it's present-tense (I'm reading a book), then it's pronounced reed. If, on the other hand, it's past-tense (I read the book), then it's pronounced red.

Homeschooling is an adventure. Explaining why we have silly language rules like this makes it even more so.

posted by ClayMan @ 8:52 AM