A-Z

Sometimes I am shocked at the amount of unlearning and relearning that I need to do... Do you remember how proud I felt when I made Nikhil type A-Z on Wordpad. I even used the word “accomplish” to describe the situation. It is only after I read the book “The Open Classroom” by K.T Margaret, that I realized what a joke this was!!! Before I read that book, even I who walks around cursing every single thing, that people are forced to do, thought A-Z and all the chanting was a necessary evil.

I also thought that the only way to teach the alphabet was to chant “A for Apple, B for Ball ... Z for Zebra”. I know this is silly. But even a freak like me could not imagine any better. How was the alphabet taught to you in your school? Do you know there are better ways to handle this? Have you encountered schools that do something different? What are the other things they do differently in early schooling?

I soon realized how random A-Z was. QWERTY which is the keyboard layout is more ordered. The order ensures that characters usually found adjacent to each other in English words were spaced as far away as possible from each other. This was done to prevent jamming on a typewriter. It has become a curse to the IT industry because it ensures that your hand faces the maximum amount of strain. But still at least there is some order!!! Dvorak minimizes the strain and is used in ergonomic keyboards. But there is still some order!!! A-Z has no order. What can be more absurd than that.

Not only do we have a lack of order, but also we have 4 sets of 26 characters, mostly doing the same things without much benefit. You have 2 sets of cursive characters and 2 sets of normal ones with a total of 104 different characters. And still you have no match between what you speak and what you write. So people invented the “Spelling Bee”... to transform their kids into geniuses.

Anyone who learnt an Indian language is capable of spelling any word without having to be a genius. The characters are arranged so beautifully, that with some slight assistance a kid could start constructing the table. All characters are clearly associated with how the corresponding sounds are produced in the voice machinery of our bodies. The vowels are all packed up in a set, the consonants in another... I won't bother further explaining... If you go to sanskrit and see some of the panini sutras, you will admire the beauty and the no nonsense attitude.

I am not telling all this out of patriotism... It simply is beautiful. We did not produce any Einsteins and Newtons and I feel as indebted to them as I feel to my own countrymen. I am only sad that so many children need to endure pointless torture merely because something is a convention. But what can you do!!! QWERTY is the standard on the keyboard... English is the Language of the world. Esperanto will never become the language of the world, Just like Dvorak will not get mass appeal.

Sometimes I thank God, that the French did not dominate the world. What if Napoleon had succeeded in his attempts to conquer the world. Then our poor kids would have been learning the billions of conventions that they invented.

Sometimes I wish Hitler had won WW II. For all you know... he might have been no worse than Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction... He must have been just another cruel dictator blown out of proportion because the victors get to write history. To be frank, I am deeply moved by holocaust movies and the dairy of Anne Frank. But who knows whether this guy was really any worse than Bush or Saddam Hussein.

German is far better as a language with respect to phonetics. In fact in 1996 they rewrote rewrote their dictionaries to fix words that did not match pronunciation. Wow that must need real courage. Sometimes you can constructively exploit greed of publishers to make positive social change. Imagine, how much reprinting that would have needed. Ok just kidding... Don't take it too seriously... I am not an expert in these areas. So spare the flame wars.

Whether we like it or not. English is now the most useful international language. Quiet a lot of the growth of India as an emerging Super Power can be credited to English and its usefulness in BPO and IT. We need to teach this language to the next generation. But we can definitely minimize the drudgery we impose on the helpless kids.

Also maybe there is beauty in saying things in a twisted way. We all love the unnecessary ambiguity that pronouns add to language. If there are no pronouns in a paragraph of text, one immediately concludes that, it must have been written by a very small kid, a computer or some one with some mental disability. God only knows how many wars would have been fought by misinterpreting pronouns and idioms and other linguistic toys.

The French must be having a lot of Good literature. I am sure English has. So it is definitely an interesting intellectual pursuit. But for “getting things done”... it would have been better to have the least amount of pointless nonsense. A tiny step in the right direction seems to be the Americanization spellings like color. But hats of to the Germans, I never thought anyone would dare to even think of such an adventure.

I fully understand that Indian kids would have to learn English and it has become a more unifying language than even Hindi. But, when there are better methods than “A for Apple, B for Ball ... Z for Zebra” why don't we adopt them universally? I will describe the method that K.T Margaret speaks about in a future post. For now, why don't you think of a better method? Maybe you can come up with something even better!!!