Hello, my pretties.
As of late, your mad scientist has been giving his victims,er, subjects a battery of tests to see how big their individual vocabularies are. Sadly, it is not uncommon for students to graduate from a failed school district with reading and writing skills at the 5/6th grade level. This isn't news, however. As a brilliant social scientist, I was much more intrigued to observe the common misunderstandings of certain words amongst my test subjects.
Some of the mistakes were obvious: "vocation" was often mistaken for "vacation." So too was it common for my lab rats to confuse the word "fabricate" with "clothe."
Less obviously resolved is the tendency for students to believe that the word "extrovert" means a "main idea." My dear legions, why do you think this is? The word clandestine, which means secretive or covert, was often thought to be a synonym for "noble." I can only speculate that the letter combinations like "destine" and the word "clan" bring to mind great families and royal bloodlines, but I can't be sure. The only potential confusion that makes a sad, grim kind of sense to me is that many of the testers, who have come from poor backgrounds with unstable family lives, conflate the word "diversity" with "separation."
ending on a less pleasant note,
RRM.
As of late, your mad scientist has been giving his victims,er, subjects a battery of tests to see how big their individual vocabularies are. Sadly, it is not uncommon for students to graduate from a failed school district with reading and writing skills at the 5/6th grade level. This isn't news, however. As a brilliant social scientist, I was much more intrigued to observe the common misunderstandings of certain words amongst my test subjects.
Some of the mistakes were obvious: "vocation" was often mistaken for "vacation." So too was it common for my lab rats to confuse the word "fabricate" with "clothe."
Less obviously resolved is the tendency for students to believe that the word "extrovert" means a "main idea." My dear legions, why do you think this is? The word clandestine, which means secretive or covert, was often thought to be a synonym for "noble." I can only speculate that the letter combinations like "destine" and the word "clan" bring to mind great families and royal bloodlines, but I can't be sure. The only potential confusion that makes a sad, grim kind of sense to me is that many of the testers, who have come from poor backgrounds with unstable family lives, conflate the word "diversity" with "separation."
ending on a less pleasant note,
RRM.
Hey.
ReplyDeleteDo you still live?