SAT Math and Logic

Last year I happened upon a book entitled, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf. If you have ever thought about how amazing it is that lines and squiggles on paper can transmit ideas and communicate, then this book will take you on an amazing journey through the human development cycle. In reading this book I was reminded how difficult the English language really is. I am going to let Maryanne Wolf lead into one of the most clever and spirited poems I have ever read:

“I take it you already know
Of touch and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
Well done! and now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?

“Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.

“And dead; it’s said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother.
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.

“And here is not a match for there,
And dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose-
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start.

“A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I’d learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to read it, the more I tried,
I hadn’t learned it at fifty-five. “

This doesn’t even touch the tip of what she covers. Definitely get a copy of this book! I found it very relevant and insightful to today’s current education system and as long as you have any sense of appreciation for history you won’t be disappointed.

– Andrew Turner

www.thinkarchimedes.com