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Word of the Day: Tune out
This one is for anyone out there who has teenagers.
If you have teenagers, then you know that they can tune you out very easily.
To tune out means to ignore someone or refuse to answer them.
It could also mean not trying to understand a current situation.
Somehow, teenagers have a knack for ignoring or pretending they don’t hear you and doing it in a way that gets right under your skin.
I know it can drive you up the wall, but what can you do?
We’ve all gone through that phase where we tuned out anyone who doesn’t ‘understand’ us or who doesn’t ‘speak our language.’
I know what you’re thinking.
How can a forty-seven-year-old guy with no children possibly understand what it is like to have teenagers?
You must have forgotten that I am an English teacher who used to teach in high school.
You have one or two, possibly three teenagers.
I had forty in the same class at the same time, and none of them wanted to learn English.
Nobody ever died during one of my lessons, and believe me, that is the miraculous thing about it.
If you think being tuned out by one individual is frustrating, try forty.
Then multiply it by six times a day, five days a week for six years.
I WIN!
At least the sheep in the picture have turned away from the person behind the camera.
Often, young people don’t even do that.
They put their earbuds in and play on their phone right in front of your face.
The worst part is you know that they can hear you.
We always think that we never tuned out our parents, but we did.
We just weren’t so obvious about it.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 82.
The higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100, the easier the passage is to read.