A Doctor of Edge - ication?

🥳 Congratulations to the class of 2025! 🎓 Here's a funny memory of my own graduation. My family always remembers this one with a laugh! I re-created it with the help of AI. 🤣 

There was automated closed captioning on the arena’s big screen during the ceremony. It said I had a “Doctor of Edge-ication” as I walked across the stage. It was hilarious!

It seems voice recognition and generative AI often have trouble with English phonics and spelling.

I was a reviewer on a project with AI generated word lists for specific phonemes. The AI was maybe 60% accurate with easy sounds and maybe 40% with more complex sounds.

So, in honor of this year’s degrees in education, let's do what AI can’t! Hear AND spell well!

Here’s why the word “education” is tricky to hear and spell.

First, the closed captioning was only paying attention to the sounds. Most Americans do pronounce the second sound in education like /j/, hence the “edge” mistake, even though historically, the first part (edu) used to be pronounced more clearly like “ed-you.”

Second, it’s from Latin. You can tell because of the -tion ending. Word history matters.

Every English word that ends with -tion, -sion, and -cion endings will be from Latin. English words that trace back to Latin often came to us through French back around the 1100s.

By the way, did you know that the suffix isn't really -tion? Chances are that you learned -tion, -sion, and -cion were the suffixes. But that isn’t exactly correct.

The actual suffix is -ion because the t, s, and c respectively are part of the Latin root word. In Latin, the suffix would have looked like -io or -ionis, depending on how the word was used. For example, education is related to the words educate, educated, and educating. You can see the “t” exists in all forms of the word.

The word “Education” is made up of these Latin word parts:

E from the Latin preposition “ex” which means “out”

Ducat from the past participle of the Latin verb “ducere” which means “to lead”

Ion from the Latin group of suffixes io, ionis, ioni, and ionem which turn verbs into nouns that express the act, process, or result of the verb.

As we know, being educated on phonics is foundational. However, in some cases, we also need to understand word history to understand why things are spelled the way they are in English.

There’s a publication titled “Teaching Reading is Rocket Science” (L Moats). My closed captioning graduation mishap and current limitations with AI demonstrate how real this title is! If generative AI still struggles with basic phonics in English, you can bet that students and teachers will struggle also.

That’s why it’s so important to have a systematic, explicit approach to early literacy paired with teachers who deeply understand the structure and history of English orthography.

Need any help edgicating (I mean, educating) the talented people in your school system?

Drop me a message. I’d love to partner with you!