Engrish

So, I find it slightly irritating that I have to dumb down my speech to be understood around my students. I even find it offensive that our educational system isn't effective enough to teach young people that there is more than one way to say something. You can use "be aware of" OR "be cognizant" and it will still be right - but the latter sounds waaay cooler. I think the biggest problem is that I think of the bigger words before the simpler ones and when they don't know what I'm talking about my brain freezes and refuses to de-evolve. Text messaging has killed what remained of the young generation's ability to communicate using words longer than a syllable. Now they have been rendered incapable of moving beyond more than a few letters. OMG.

Am I spewing vitriol? Perhaps, or am I just being brutally truthful? Or did I just want to use the word vitriol to prove I know it? Could be any of the above.

I also heartily dislike when a teenager says (after reading through a Portugese piece), "why can't they just all learn English?" Oh, the arrogance. Nevermind outside of America, most teenagers are bilingual if not multilingual. It's okay to be stupid because we have the big guns. No, dad, I'm not being overly left-wing. Anyone with a knowledge of our educational system here should agree that we are sadly lacking in how we treat learning. It's a prison system, not a privelege, at least in the minds of the students. I don't know that it's truly a problem that can be solved because half the issue is that people these days would rather let a computer tell them how to sit, stand and brush their teeth before thinking for themselves. Kids don't seem to want to learn anything. They see no value in the information. Knowledge for knowledge's sake is definitely not the theme of modern day schooling. I don't even want to get STARTED with my thought on standardized testing. Morons and their perfect little statistic charts. Bah.

Enough ranting for one day. Now I get to go to church. It's hard to get too excited about choir when I've been in choir ALL WEEK. But hey, at least I don't have to be the one in charge.