Are you smarter than a 4th grader?

This past October, my chemistry class put on an afternoon of Halloween-themed chemistry demonstrations and activities for 75 4^th graders. Exploding pumpkins, ghost eggs, glow-in-the-dark slime, and smoke rings were just a few of their favorites. A week later, I received a packet of 75 handwritten thank you letters. Each was a treasure and whenever I need a 30 second pick me up, I just read one at random.

What was most entertaining though was their creative system of spelling. This is more of an indictment of the English language than it is of our school system so don’t blame the teachers or the parents or the current or past administrations. And certainly don’t blame the students. How well would you do in a handwritten note without a built-in spell checker? Are you smart enough to understand the written language of a 4^th grader? See if you can figure out what word they were trying to spell (and have a chuckle on me).

	What they wrote	What they meant
	actaly	actually
	favioet	favorite
	exspeshaly	especially
	toatle	totally
	prodgects	projects
	liket	liked
	aprisheat	appreciate
	cristle	crystal
	home-maid	home-made
	uneake	unique
	favret	favorite
	dride	dried
	gosht	ghost
	alsome	awesome
	aswerm	awesome
	aswam	awesome
	asumwer	more awesome

Just in case you are worried about the future of our civilization based on these results, here is a quote from one of the letters:

Thank you for the interesting Halloween chemistry expirements. The irony of it is, your expirements use dry ice and you asked us questions about it and said that the CO ₂ were “ghosts”, but we already knew from science that it was Carbon Dioxide.

A 4^th grader even knew to subscript the 2 on CO ₂! The English language may be in jeopardy but the future of chemical science will be in good hands. And in case you think he spelled “experiment” wrong, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. After doing experiments all my life, I must admit that most would have been more accurately described as “expirements”.