The Real Reason Etymology Matters - My Son's 6th Grade Class

So, my son comes home from his second day in 6th grade excited about his reading class. This is great news, as reading has been a struggle for him for so long. He says he likes his new teacher and that they were talking about words, which he likes. He is very good at making connections between words now. He showed me the page she'd given them and said he had a question. His question was, "Is bass (meaning low) related to the base like in basement?" We investigated, and indeed, it is. They both come from the Latin word bassus, meaning "short" or "low."

Then, he shows me the paper they were going over in class. Unfortunately, the front is titled, "Let's face it, English is a crazy language," and the back is titled, "Reasons why the English language is so hard to learn." Argh. Neither of these statements is true, which he knows, but it's so annoying that kids are bombarded with these false ideas. 

So, he shows me the sentence that made him think about <bass> and <base>:

 A bass was painted on the bass drum.

So, then I said, "Hmmm, let's look at <bass> the fish." There really is no other way to spell the fish, and the other bass is <ss> because of the Latin, but I was curious about the history of <bass> the fish. Turns out it used to be <baers> in Middle English. Losing the <r> before an <s> is certainly not unheard of (bust/burst, cuss/curse). I not only knew the best example of this but Doug also has the full explanation of this process under the entry for said example. 

Have you guessed it? 

How do the Brits say ass? Arse! There's the <r>. Of course, he loved that example, and it turns out that his teacher is an anglophile (She told them that the first day of school.), so I told him he should tell her about the missing <r> and see if she knew of another example. Ha ha!

Next, I notice two different sets of words used in the sentences on the paper. The first set are words that are spelled the same because they are noun/verb pairs (refuse, present, etc.) We discussed the difference between them. He was able to hear the difference and even knew it was because of stress. I then pronounced all of the words that had the stress on the second syllable and asked him if they were nouns or verbs. He realized they were all verbs. So, we talked about how often the verbs get the vocal energy at the end. Can be stress, but it can also be voicing (close, use). Not crazy. Not hard.

Lastly, we looked at the other set of words that were like <bass>. The first one we saw was <wound>. The sentence was, "The bandage was wound around the wound." We talked about the verb and not only decided it couldn't be spelled any other way, but also, there is a pattern: wind/wound, find/found, bind/bound. Made sense. Then we looked at the noun. Why was it spelled <wound> and not <woond>? It was <wund> in Old English. Well, there you go. Why would we use <oo> if there's a <u> in it already? Again, not crazy. Not hard.

THIS is why etymology is not only important to spelling; it's crucial. People are starting to accept that morphology is important and include it in their literacy instruction, but often it is late, inaccurate, or both. And etymology is still not recognized by many as an essential piece in understanding morphology. Etymology is what drives grapheme choices. It isn't hard or complicated. A 1st grader could certainly have understood the conversation we had.

What my son's homework taught me is that we now have not only half-literate kids in schools but also many who need and receive intervention who plateau when phonics no longer works for their level of text, in about 5th grade. I am convinced this is why so many K-2 teachers are doubling down that OG-based phonics works because they desperately want to get them reading. The issue is that they don't see them after they "finish" the program, when they come to us reading below grade level in middle school, and they spell by sounding out. Even in the best-case scenario, they rely on pronunciation to read, which is laborious and inefficient, and they have missed out on the relationships between words that are based on their structures and histories, not their sounds!