Almost halfway through my last year of school before college, I’d like to think that I’ve learned a thing or two. Some things have stuck with me, some things I’ll continue to practice, and some things I’ve abandoned as soon as I left the classroom on finals day. But as we traverse this cruel liminality between Thanksgiving break and Winter break, I’d like to reflect on the simplest things that were embarrassingly difficult for me to grasp throughout my educational career.
Telling Time
I like to think that I’m not alone in this one. I don’t exactly remember the entire process of learning how to read analog clocks, but I do remember my dad having to print out extra practice sheets for me. Maybe it was the number of hands, or the fact that every hand moves a different amount, or I just couldn’t count the tick marks well. Whatever it was, this took me a strangely long amount of time. But nowadays, I’m proud to say that as I sit through some of my dullest classes, I’ve become a pro.
Spelling “temperature”
I don’t even have much to say about this one. “Temperature” is just a hard word. I’m not even sure if I really fully learned how to spell it. If anything I just changed my own pronunciation of the word so that I’d remember the spelling. Hopefully I’m not alone in this, but whenever I spell it I internally say it as “temper-uh-chur”. That “a” is a sneaky one, and was quite the wall to climb back in my elementary school days.
What does “i before e except after c” even mean
This one is just absolutely absurd. I was taught, like most of you probably were, that when spelling words with a consecutive “i’ and “e”, “i” always comes before “e” except when they are both after a “c”. Just understanding this idea was completely foreign to me, and I would always either use the rhyme incorrectly or find an unlucky exception. This tip always felt like one of those spelling hacks that you can just trust is always correct, one that allows you to forfeit consciousness and sink into a kind of mental leisure. But weirdly enough, the more I used it, the more exceptions I found. At a certain point I started to get confused and questioned Big English themselves. Their own nifty little rhyme was not taking me to the heights in my spelling career that I thought I could seize. In fact, it was quite the counterfeit tip. Just to prove my point, I tried to use as many exceptions to this rule as I could in this paragraph. And let’s just say, eight plus two, ten (snuck another one in there) in one paragraph is WAY too many for this rule to be a thing.
23/7
I thought about a lot of things in 2nd grade. We learned about caterpillars and butterflies, carrying and borrowing in addition and subtraction, area and perimeter, but I was not ready to learn that a day was not 24 hours. I’m not sure why, but Mrs. Burns, just kept a science book in her room that had the ability to shake a seven year old child’s perception of the world. A day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds. The remaining 3 minutes and 56 seconds aren’t even insignificant, that is essentially the difference between a late arrival day class period and a HR/WIN day class period. Even as I look it up more now, I’m falling down a deeper rabbit hole and realizing I still don’t get it. It’s something about sidereal days, solar days, the sun, and the stars.
Doing Work
4th grade offered me a rude awakening. It was around this time when I started to get familiar with the concept of an assignment. Coincidentally, this was also the first year that we had our own classroom laptops. I’m not really sure what I was thinking, but the idea of being accountable for the things I was assigned was not really something I understood at the time. I ended up spending a bulk of my 4th grade experience on Cool Math Games. Once the end of the year came, I was in for quite the discovery. While everyone was having fun in the last few days of the school year, I had dozens and dozens of missing assignments and apparently that meant something. I sat out of a lot of end of year celebrations, focusing as much as my 10 year old mind could.
Hopefully this was somewhat relatable, or maybe I just seem like an absolute idiot, but sometimes thinking of these things helps me remember how far I’ve come. What we don’t know is an insanely large and unquantifiable amount, but that shouldn’t stop you from recognizing how much you do know. While I go through these motions in the last three weeks of first semester and the last two weeks before my early decision, it’s been important for me to celebrate the little things. If I have nothing left, at least I can tell time and spell “temperature”.
Hi Matthew,
I could definitely agree with the doing work part. Especially for a child who has access to the unlimited treasure trove of distractions called the internet, it’s hard to actually do work. I used to constantly play all of the games you have pictured, but one that I was especially fond of was Learn2Fly. The sad thing behind all of these games is that they all ran on the Adobe Flash player, and with that going defunct, a lot of these games that are so nostalgic to me are impossible to play.
The 23 minute thing also reminded me of the misconceptions that we can have for a long time, especially because a trustworthy adult told us so. I distinctly remember two things like that: For the longest time I thought Alaska and Russia were connected by a bridge called the “Bering Land Bridge” because I had read it in an Altas, I guess Lil ‘ol Siyu was 35,000 years too late. Another one that stuck with me for an embarrassing amount of time is that you can’t begin a sentence with “And.” It was in AP Language last year that Mrs. Parato finally set me straight and told me there’s nothing wrong with starting a sentence with “And.”
I guess the takeaway from this comment is that I’m a terrible student.
Matthew
I still can’t spell temperature correctly on the first try, and now that we type everything, if I’m writing something by hand I’ll just leave it blank and move on. After reading your post, I realize that, I too, have beef with big english, Not only things like I before E or Temperature, but the inconsistency of letter sounds. My white whale is the fact that ough makes five different sounds (Tough, Cough, Through, Though, Drought) but for some god-forsaken reason Phoney and Bologna rhyme. English, get it together. I too spent an immeasurable amount of time playing cool math games instead of assignments, my favorites being Duck Life 3 Evolution and Jacksmith, as well as any Papa’s game, but I never got to the point where I was behind on assignments, for I knew the belt would come for me. I never had a problem with time, but I also was wearing analog watches since the third grade, so I guess it’s not a fair comparison. Overall, and entertaining post. Great Job!
Matthew, your discussion of a day indeed not being 24 hours really resonated with me, but not in the traditional sense (no, I did not fixate on this fact). Instead, it brought up a similar experience I had involving leap years, and how a year was never 365 days long. “Why even say 365 days,” I used to say to myself. I would like to say these thoughts never evolved into obsession, but I would be telling a white lie in saying so. Once, I brought this up to my dad, who gave me a still-unsatisfying answer: “We just round up, for ease”. For ease. Why make it easier? After all, my math teacher had told me that everything worth doing in life is never easy. So why make an already “easy” affair even easier? Anyway, the point I want to make is this blog reignited some of my own childhood confusions and pet peeves, for which I am not sure whether to thank you for.
Matthew,
I am shocked to hear about the leap year making up for our lack of 24 hour days. Something about this just is not sitting right with me and I can’t wrap my head around the fact. I also can’t believe that I have never heard this before from anyone, because it seems like something that might come up more often. Though not the word temperature, I also struggled with the spelling of a few words that I will admit still cannot be spelled properly if it weren’t for autocorrect. For example, definitely (I still don’t spell this right) and beautiful took me a very long time to learn. I find myself saying the “i before e except after c” rule to myself a lot in my head, but I never even thought about how many words do not follow this rule until you pointed it out. Overall, this was a super fun post to read, and it’s cool to hear about how many of our struggles are universal.
This was a enjoyable list to read through. Your provide a sense of humor towards some items on the list. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Learning to tell time. I have enjoyed reading your blogs this semester.
Matthew, this is one of the funniest blogs I’ve read. However, it was also one that was oddly relatable. Telling time was a struggle for me as well and I have vivid memories of having to struggle my way through those clock worksheets. However, we’ve both mastered this task as we sit through some of our less favorite classes, many of which we share. Aside from clocks being a struggle, I thoroughly enjoyed the section on the “I before E except after C” rule and I couldn’t agree with you more. There seem to be way too many exceptions for it to be a rule, and for the words the rule applies to, they’re far too simple to have a rule for. Overall, this was one of my favorite blog reads this year and I enjoyed the laugh.