More Interesting Ways to Educate People

I was looking for new topics to talk about in my blog and I just randomly clicked on one of the links that were posted on the D2L page. That link was for the the newspaper Cherokee Phoenix (well for their online newspaper). I was looking around on the front page for a little, when I saw the beginning of one story that really interested me. To be honest, the name of this article,"NSU Students Create Cherokee Language Happy Hour", is what originally struck my interest. This article. written by Tesina Jackson, is about the students that are enrolled in Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The students that were in the Cherokee language class came up with the idea that they wanted to get more people knowing about the Cherokee language, and educating more people than just the class itself. What they decided to do was make the menus on restaurants in Cherokee language and then on the opposite side of the menu they put a cheat sheet of how exactly to say and pronounce the words, and what the words meant.

NSU Cherokee program director Dr. Leslie Hannah states in the article, “From our perspective at the university, especially my students in the programs that we run at Northeastern, they practice Cherokee all day long in classrooms. They practice Cherokee in the hallways there, but they really don’t bring it outside into the community where they can mix with the fluent speakers, where they can mix with the people that use it everyday out on the streets of Tahlequah, out in the roads of the communities". She continues by saying, “They’ve got classroom Cherokee, so this is our effort to bring that Cherokee out of the classroom into the community and let them get some community Cherokee because it is a community language". I think that this is an amazing thing to do. Not only are these students getting educated, but they too are educating other people. By changing the menus in restaurants from English To Cherokee is a great and smart way to educate people that do not much about the Cherokee's or their language. I know that if I want to a restaurant and saw that the entire menu was in Cherokee instead of English, it would intrigue me and make me more interested to find out more about the Cherokees. And I am sure that many of the people that are seeing these menus are are having to order their food in Cherokee are becoming more interested in learning more and more about the Cherokees. This is a great way to educate people, and to have them want to educate themselves more by speaking that language.