English is Weird

One of the things that worried me most about homeschooling was teaching math.I was never good at it, never enjoyed it, and the thought of trying to teach it to my kids almost prevented me from homeschooling at all. Jeremiah and I even talked about it before we made our decision and came to the conclusion that we may have to "outsource" that subject someday.

English, on the other hand, was my strong point. I've always been a great speller, and consider myself somewhat of a grammarian. I feel a twisted sense of superiority when I find a grammatical error or misspelling in a published work and sometimes amuse myself by mentally correcting a speaker's grammar. When George W. was in office, I was in my element.

The problem is, there's a chasm between knowing something and trying to transfer that knowledge to someone else, and, ironically, I'm finding it much easier to teach Math. Math is made up of facts. Concrete, unchanging. There's a reason for everything, and that reason is usually pretty straightforward and easy to show to someone. English on the other hand, is starting to seem like a lot of mumbo-jumbo. I know how to spell, speak, and write correctly, I just don't always know why. I before E...ever heard of weird?! Why do ought and aught sound the same? We're on modified vowel sounds...are,ear,air,ere,err...they all say "are" as in "square". Do you know what it's like to try to make this make sense to a seven year old?!

Luckily Gracie is reading well and seems to just pick up which sound the modified vowels are making based on context, which in the end I guess is pretty much how everyone learns it unless you're a studying Latin. But every time we sit down for phonics, I'm reminded of this "I Love Lucy" episode. Ricky, you have my sympathies...