Miss Dee's Corner

Instructional videos made for kids often present letters as cartoon characters that can walk and talk. This helps grab the attention of young learners and keep them interested as they learn their alphabet. It also makes it easier for kids to remember what they learned. As a teacher, it comes naturally to me to personify letters, especially when I am teaching very young kids. However, what if we took the personification of letters to another level. Do letters have personalities? Do the shapes of certain letters resemble certain personality patterns? Here is what the shapes of some Amharic letters make me think of, what I imagine their personalities would be like if these letters were people.  1) Home ሀ ሁ ሂ ሃ ሄ ህ ሆ በ ቡ ቢ ባ ቤ ብ ቦ These letter families are similar in that they have two vertical strokes and an opening either at the top or the bottom. ሀ and በ, in general,  strike me as plain and boring. This might be because they don’t have any twists or comp...

Do you like you ? No, I don’t mean your job, your career, your family, your nationality, your hobbies, how much money you make, your life experiences … For a moment, let us focus on the qualities or traits that make you the person you are. There is no denying that external aspects of our identity such as family, race, career, etc are important. Also, the external influences in our lives can shape our personality traits to a great extent. Genes play their part too. However, there is also the factor of choice. We can choose whether to forgive or retaliate, to be kind or cruel, empathetic or judgmental, caring or callous, humble or conceited, etc. We make these choices either because of or despite our environmental and biological background. They are choices, nonetheless. A good deal of readers may disagree, and my goal in this article is not to prove that free will exists. That, in fact, is my premise. And if you don’t like or agree with it, you have a choice: you can either go alo...