Cool kids

Lots of people have had a teacher who was “the cool teacher”. Has anyone else had a teacher who thought you were a cool student?

Like, they think you’re really talented in a way that’s not just doing well with the class material but like, they personally admire what you’re doing. Or they think of you as “one of the cool kids” in the sense of having radical opinions or a cutting-edge sense of style.

I’ve had a few and it’s a little uncomfortable.

I guess what it really boils down to is them thinking you’re cool-er than they are. There’s probably some idealism involved, about young people being more energetic, creative, exciting. And probably also something I’ve heard a lot of people describe re: bullying, and which I definitely experience– having the same emotional reaction to Cool Teenagers as you used to have as a less-cool teenager, even when you’re an adult and have power over them in various ways.

Also a bit of the universal thing where other people always seem more confident and decisive than you are, because you don’t know the thought process behind what they’re doing, you only see the actions.

I don’t know. It’s a really interesting phenomenon, especially since it happened to me in what seemed like very similar ways at a variety of ages, from middle school to college.

I wrote elsewhere today

But here’s a small cool thing I learned:

The Devanagari writing system (which some languages from India are written in) has something in common with katakana&hiragana in Japanese: Instead of having one symbol for each of what English speakers would consider letters, it has one symbol per syllable, combining a consonant and a vowel.

This is really informative re: how place names, given names, words in Indian languages are pronounced, and also re: how native speakers of these languages pronounce English words. Which is why I learned this in the course of a captioning project.

Devanagari, I have learned, tends to force you to write an A sound after consonants, even if the word isn’t really pronounced that way. So there are a lot of “silent” (ish) As in Hindi words.