Take a nursery rhyme and “translate” it from English into English, but using larger, longer, more technical words. She suggested the students get their parents involved, saying that it can be fun.

My son came home with his eyes wider than I’d seen him in a very long time. “Dad!”, he said, “you THINK like this!”

So we sat down to give it a try. “Three Blind Mice” became “A Trio of Visually-Impaired Rodentiae”. “This Little Piggy Went to Market” transmogrified into “This Diminutive Porcine Creature Journeyed to the Retailing Place for Comestibles”.

And so forth. My son’s teacher was attempting to encourage her students to use their brains. teh “eduk8r” in the stor-e dint care abt nething xcpt 2b freinds w/her kidz.

It’s sad. Certainly doesn’t make me LOL. Maybe WOL.

That’s “weep”.

I still have the results of the assignment. I’ll email it to “NE1″ who wants a copy.

Language is a shared cultural definition in a given space. It needs to be organic of course.

The system is actually designed to fail you know. That’s no secret. Good teachers are being given bad curriculums. Heck, the only reason I can spell is because I’ve set up firefox to do the hard work for me.

I don’t really care about the way people type because I think it’s not right to judge someone by the way they write, but teaching students to do something one way and then later be told to do it a different way for no good reason seems wrong.

1) Schools are supposed to prepare us for college and teach us useful life skills. I doubt any admissions deans will be impressed by an essay written in chatspeak.

2) And once our teachers certify us as fluent in LOLs and other acronyms/abbreviations like that, where are we supposed to use our new English skills? In our Ph.D dissertations? As a scientist, submitting a report on our findings to a scientific publication in lowercase?

3) It’s also just really pathetic when newspapers, for example, write articles about the rise of chatspeak and use sentences like ‘if ur going OMG about dis, u should c…’. This is kind of the same thing, but worse, because teachers are not supposed to take a cue in teaching from their own students.

There’s basically two dominant views on chatspeak, as Naomi Most mentioned: people that take the alarmist standpoint, thinking that teenage texting lingo is going to take over the world (it won’t; there’s tons of old people out there), and people that consider it the natural evolution of the English language and advocate just going with the flow.

Both views are kind of BS, and I’m just enormously relieved that my teachers are far too clever to get mired in either.

I’d like to see Sandy Garret tell me what use writing English papers the way I talk to my friends will be in real life.