It's been harder than I thought to write the "why I blog" post that's been on my backlog for ages. So I'm just going to do it.
I suppose my blog can most charitably be called "eclectic." Some blogs are political, some personal journals, some accumulate interesting articles and news stories, some keep far-flung families in contact, some are formed around a specific cause or issue. I aim to be jack-of-all-trades, and if that means being master of none, I see nothing wrong with that. It depends on your audience. Five-star restaurants require highly-trained and gifted chefs, but I'd take my mother's home cooking and the family dinner table any day. Fine. But why? Why do I put so much time and effort into blogging? What do I hope to accomplish? (More)This is a joke, right? It doesn't surprise me that some crackpot with "Dr." in front of his name should decide that we could solve the widespread problem of students' appalling inability to spell by merely accepting their mistakes as "spelling variants." After all, professors of education have promoted weirder ideas, and Ken Smith is only a lecturer in criminology who is fed up with wasting his time trying to correct the failures of his students' spelling teachers. It's not our children's fault they had the misfortune to be born into an era of standardized spelling. Dr. Smith's frustration can't be much more than mine as I try to decipher the writings of my intelligent, well-educated, and highly respected colonial American ancestors, who couldn't even spell their own names consistently.
What makes me sure of the intended humor is this passage in the article: Dr. Smith said there was no reason many commonly misspelt words were configured the way they were. The word 'twelfth', for example, would make more sense as 'twelth', he said. 'How on earth did that "f" get in there? You would not dream of spelling the words "stealth" or "wealth" with a[n] "f" (as in 'stealfth' or "wealfth") so why insist on putting the "f" in twelfth?'. Since a moment's thought about both the origin and the pronunciation of "twelfth" would reveal the answer, Smith must be pulling our legs, perhaps making his point in the spirit of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal.
As the story spreads, however, some folks are finding the idea of this Irish baby fricassee more palatable than not. All I can say is that my friends who teach college math should have thought of this years ago. Instead of complaining that your students can't add two and two and get four, much less construct a simple proof, why not simply accept 2+2=5 as a variant sum? And who are you to decide what's "true" and "proven," anyway?
