[Sethomas]

I once was in a training sequence to become a teacher for Kaplan, coaching GRE strategies to classes of college students who have the financial resources to pay $850 for 20 hours of lessons but not the actual intelligence to get into grad school. This was funny because I had never actually taken the GRE in a formal setting myself, you see, nor had I even graduated from college (a sad fact that holds true today).

When I had to give sample lessons to the trainers, they thought at first that I'd be a fantastic teacher because of the way I'd explain the hidden intricacies of etymology, even for those frequent cases where I had no idea what a word meant until I looked it up in the cheat sheet in the teacher's manual. At one point I was explaining the word "aver", and I gave the following insider tip:

You see, even though we all know well that "ver" comes from the Latin "veritas", meaning "truth", I often get confused myself with the a- prefix. The trick here is to keep in mind that Latin roots and Greek roots usually stick with other roots of the same language, so here we relate the a- to the Latin "towards" and not the Greek "not" or "un-" because of "veritas" being Latin.

The trainer just kind of interrupted and had to collect his thoughts for a long while before scolding me about my assumptions of how much Greek and Latin my target audience had taken in their coursework.

Anyways, the whole thing fell through because I refused to invest the effort in memorizing 30-minute sequences verbatim of procedures to explain how to find the area of a triangle. I could have collected on some training pay, but the paperwork was so tedious on my end that I was satisfied to just keep their PRICELESS and SECRET teacher's manual for when I actually want to take the GRE.