Given that I had nothing better to do today I decided to try and teach some of the other dogs to read and write. I couldn’t believe how frustrating it turned out to be. It wasn’t really their fault but I wasn’t sure if I should be teaching them the names of the letters or the sounds they made. I eventually decided to start with phonetics and only then realised that I was assuming that they would all want to learn English and they didn’t. It turns out that the phonetic sounds for the letters aren’t the same in Flemish as they are in English and the letter ‘g’ is particularly odd. So we ended up having a disagreement about whether there was a right and a wrong way to do things and one of the brighter ones said that he had heard that even in English there were some letters and sets of letters that sounded different when used in the same word. At this point I conceded that he had a point we agreed that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher. One of them tried suggesting that if you could say things in different ways then it wasn’t possible to ever actually be wrong and whilst I thought this approach had some merit it would be very hard to communicate if we all took that approach. I concluded that teaching may not be as easy as it had first appeared and that I would be far better leaving it to the experts.
I still haven’t worked out what career I should follow but it definitely is not teaching. Perhaps my mistress had a point when she suggested getting my diary published. I wonder if Harry Hedgehog would mind if I wrote his life story in a book.