Good Ole' English

This is the homework I've been working on for the last 3 hours:
translating pages and pages of Old English text (above) into modern usage and then in to phonetic transcription (below)
then spending even more time analyzing each sentence and identifying the parts of speech, the cases, defining strong and weak adjectives and verbs, determining class and function, finding out which fricatives are voiceless and which are voiced, memorizing phonemic symbols... you know... every day stuff. 

I'm exhausted...

But I figured it out. I now know WHY I have to do all of this. Everything in our education is applicable to every aspect of our lives (like all that calculus I learned in high school that I incorporate in to my daily life and still completely remember how to do... ehem) and will benefit us in our chosen field. It's so that when I'm a high school teacher and my students are acting up, I can start yelling at them in Old English while I write random verb patters on the board and map out fricative charts and write all my instructions in phonetic transcription. Then my students will get scared and will be quiet and I will begin teaching again. If they complain about not being able to understand me or my instructions, I will tell them they can only complain if their complaints are in early middle english from the east midland dialect that was heavily influenced by the Norman Vikings and that typically their preterit will not include d's or t's since they tend to be weaker verbs. They won't look me in the eye, probably because they will be so impressed. Kids will stop speaking up in class because they will be so enthralled with all I have to say about palatal glides as they relate to the runic alphabet. Then in the hallway they'll all start talking about the cool new English teacher. And then the kids will respect me. I'll have them eliminate all french borrowings from their speech and will fail them if I ever hear them mispronounce a diphthong. They'll stop asking questions because I will have taught them the ancient runes so well that they won't have questions. In fact, they'll probably stop coming to my class because I will have made them into such linguistic scholars that they won't need class. I'll get emails and phone calls from parents that I won't read or answer because I'm a humble person and won't want to bask in their praise. Some days we'll do really fun things like reverse the great vowel shift and pronounce things all day as they were pronounced in the year 786 and if my kids mess up, I will yell Old Icelandic words at them to inspire them. The principal will come in and ask me to stop teaching the way I teach (naturally because it's so effective that I'm making the other teachers look bad) and they'll send in people from the district to observe me (no doubt to take notes on how to be amazing) and I'll be the best teacher ever. And then I'll choose to retire after two years. 

BYU is really taking care of me.

Back to work.