I just finished teaching my Default Graphemes™ LEXinar.
This was my fifth round of this class, which was new last spring. Two sections in the spring, two in summer, and I've got two scheduled again for this fall, because it's pretty popular. I also changed it from three 90-minute installments to three 2-hour installments, because it's got a lot of content.
I first want to make clear that the concept of Default Graphemes™ is mine. The concept of a defult is not mine, and the concept of graphemes is not mine, but I put them together. No one else did that, and no one else has the same understanding. I have noticed various other teacher-types hanging up a shingle to host discussions on default graphemes, or questions being asked in various online formats where I do not participate. You won't get good understanding there. NONE of the other people offering to explain the concept to you have even bothered to take my class, and no one who has taken my class has my permission to share its contents with other adults.
If, by the way, you've taken one of my classes, and you want to share the content you've learned with other adults, you'd better check with me first, as you may be violating what you agreed to when you signed up. While I want people to share the content with any children who are their students, if you feel that another adult needs this understanding, the thing to do is to tell them to take my class, not to offer your personal summary of my work.
If, for example, you knew the IPA before you took my class because you're a speech path, but after taking my class, you decide to offer an IPA class to other people in which you focus on the difference between phonetics and phonology, that's theft. You got that focus from my class, and it's not yours to offer.
I'm not a selfish person. I want my understanding to get a foothold out there, not because it's mine, but because it's factual and rooted in actual evidence from the writing system. But what I offer is radically different from what you can get elsewhere, and I've been burned a number of times. I've hired a lawyer and written terms and everything, but people sometimes really suck. One woman in Canada who had not even taken my Syllables: Fact & Fiction™ LEXinar, but she still stole the title of it. How do I know she stole it? Because once confronted, she took it off her website. I'm serious: people are slimy with my work.
And the Default Graphemes™ LEXinar offers totally new work. A brand-new understanding.
"It’s so rich, so dense, so many wow moments," says one participant.
"This is so very helpful to me as a dyslexic," says another.
And "This really shines such a new perspective on grapheme choices from what I was introduced to in my OG training," says a third.
Indeed it does. And there's the rub.
In spite of overwhelming scientific evidence, OG and its Phombies continue to teach the schwa – [ə] – and "short u" – [ʌ] – as the same thing, and they're not.
They're not. Understanding the difference is critical to spelling, because you can also see the difference between them with regards to the graphemes that can spell them.