Here's something that's been stuck in my head.

A student was looking at the word "have."

Couldn't make sense of it. Why isn't it just H-A-V? Why is there an E at the end if it doesn't do anything?

And a teacher — one who'd been at this for years — said: "English is just crazy sometimes."

Oof.

Here's the thing, though.

English isn't crazy.

It just makes sense at a different level than most of us were taught to look.

That's the whole point of one of my favorite episodes from season two.

I sat down with Sarah Paul — a reading interventionist and genuine word nerd — to dig into morphology.

Not the scary kind. The kind that starts with kindergartners and the word "cats."

Sarah said something that I haven't stopped thinking about since:

Stop waiting to teach morphology. Start sprinkling it in kindergarten. Because the fourth grader who's never heard the word "morpheme" is the one who's overwhelmed.

And the one who's been building that word bank since kindergarten?

They have tools. They have somewhere to start.

This episode is for teachers who want to give their students those tools — without adding anything new to an already full plate.