That kid, Jacob, who I'm tutoring: Awesome. He's not a genius, attentive, and nor exceeding expectations. He's a normal 7-year-old kid, and he's trying.
Oh, another great thing is I'm tutoring him in English! I mean, "Language Arts".
Just after two days of working with him, I'm come to appreciate the finesse of education to feed us rules we were the perfect age to just accept.
I finished a class in critical theory and criticism of literature, and one theorist, Ferdinand Saussure, explained that since letters themselves are symbols, with no literal connection to their meaning...
For example, the letter "r" has absolutely no connection to the sound it makes. Think about it. It looks like a twig, a little stick with a nub. Yet when combined with other letters in our alphabet, it means a multiplicity of things. So Saussure pointed out that is an inherent aspect of language, ambiguity and an arbitrary nature.
So when you try to explain to a kid why it's spelled "cough" and "coff", you find you really can't explain it.
The existence of entire histories, philosophies, sciences, and maths is contingent on a system that, comparatively, is like an adolescent deity whose hair color may go pink tomorrow.
This is the wonder that teachers, of all grades, go through. That was what made me want to be a teacher for years.
Just...maybe not in Florida.
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