Jessica’s Blog!

High school is the big change in your life. It is the beginning of a life as a young adult, and the chance to prove your worth to the world. The first day of freshman year is always unnerving, full of lost students, jammed lockers, and classmates trying not to mess up their chances. As a freshman myself, and having been in school for only a week and a half, I can already tell that high school will be much different from middle school.

I love the freedom given you in high school. We are not little children anymore, and they respect that. We can roam anywhere we want in the morning before school starts. The cafeteria, the library, as well as the halls are all open. Lunch is an entire hour long. By far, this extended lunch period has been my favorite change from middle school. We are allowed to go anywhere in and around the courtyard, whereas in middle school we were required to sit with our classes at a designated lunch table. I am able to talk to all my friends that I have been separated from because of different schedules. We have more time to socialize. The Agora is also a nice touch. This time also serves as a study hall, for all those students that like to cram in a few minutes of studying before a test or quiz comes up.

Ken Smith clearly has not thought this through. This is most likely a spur of the moment idea that came to his mind one day. As convenient as it seems, how will “thier”, “liek”, or “ignor” sound on a college application? Good spelling and vocabulary are things that separate the well-learned from the rest. It is what helps a good essay stand out from the rest.

Shorthand and misspellings should only be acceptable in social conversation, not in an academic environment.  “Social” and “academic” do not mean the same thing. If students are taught that it is acceptable to misspell words, they may do it on purpose and make up all sorts of crazy spellings, and the teacher cannot do anything about it as long as it sounds like it is supposed to. There might even be dozens of phonetically correct spellings for every word. The real spellings of hundreds of words may be pushed out of existence, replaced by the easier but much less sophisticated spellings. George Bernard Shaw gives a very good example. If someone spells “fish” as “ghoti” in a book, many people will have no idea what the author is talking about. In fact, if I hadn’t known it was supposed to mean fish, i would have thought it was some kind of desert. Having a proper way to spell things will lessen the confusion and also make learning a new language much easier for foreigners. There is a reason why a foreigner is taught the proper way to spell things first, and only consider shorthand and abreviations if he or she were to consider living in that country. Think of how  IM slang can confuse them!