A parent hoping to homeschool her daughter caught some serious flack from internet users after fumbling an exercise in her child’s workbook.
TikTok user Melende (@jaredhmelende) posted a recent video showcasing an exercise in a children’s workbook titled, “matching ending consonants.” She captioned the video “Help!!” As of Wednesday evening, her video garnered more than 2.6 million views.
“We’re going to start home school soon, but tell me if I’m just dumb or I don’t understand this,” Melende asked viewers in the video.
The exercise requires students to identify words with the same ending sound among rows of different objects. For example, the first problem has drawings of a rug, horse, and flag. So the two items that would be circled in that case would be the rug and the flag because they have the same “g” sound at the end of the word.
However, Melende expressed confusion over the exercise, adamantly stating that none of the problems had matching sounds.
“Let’s do the third [problem],” she said. “Chair, stair, box—They don’t end with the same sound. None of these end with the same sound.”
@jaredhmelende ♬ original sound – _Melende
As it turns out, Melende was misreading the instructions and was attempting to find images of words that rhymed instead of ending with the same consonant sound, she said in a follow-up video.
“Now, if this would’ve said [‘letter’ instead of ‘sound’], then I would’ve been ok,” Melende said, pointing to the instructions.
According to DuoLingo, compared to the English language, many other languages limit how many consonants are within a word, making learning the pronunciation of a word in English a little bit harder for some people.
Some commenters were quick to criticize Melende for the simple mistake.
“As a kindergarten teacher this hurt please don’t homeschool if you don’t understand phonics which is the basis for reading,” user @mins_mind said.
Meanwhile, other viewers cut her some slack, admitting that the English language is not always easy to understand.
“This is where the English language is confusing where letters have different sounds than what they really are,” user Ania (@ania.lorenc) said.
