Today I actually got to teach English to an adult. Operating off the barter system, Andres, our permaculture guide, gives us perma-tips and we take turns giving him English lessons. When I asked him what he wanted to work on he said pronunciation, so I pulled a page from Billy Madison’s spelling bee and taught Andres some tricks to sounding it out. I think it blew his mind. I was having French phonetique class flashbacks as we went over how vowels (not bowels as Andres wanted to call them) change their sound depending on the presence of other letters. An “e” at the end of a word really does magical stuff. It’s not mad, it’s made.