Brave! This College Grad Wants to Teach English in Asia Even Though She Can’t Spell “Embarass”

‘Embaras?, embbarrass??, emmbarrass???’

March 2, 2022

Kelly Brimmel, age 22, recent college graduate and future English instructor for children in Chi-Pat, Cambodia has always been interested in charity. “I mean, language is a gift. It’s such a beautiful thing to know, to wield.” Brimmel graduated with a degree in cultural anthropology, her thesis title reads: “Investigating Pedagogy Across Language Barriers: Optimizing Language Instruction to Minimize Embbarassment.”

Brimmel’s interest in charity began at a young age. When she was 5, she made cookies just to give out to homeless people. “Those cookies weren’t even from a recipe or anything. I just mixed flour, water, chocolate chips, and baked it for 20 minutes. Everyone was so grateful until they ate them. They started choking and spitting and throwing up but it really felt like I was making a difference.”

Brimmel will travel to Cambodia in the summer, though some find her departure quite controversial. “Kelly has no business teaching English,” commented Professor Eady, her thesis advisor, “I kept telling her to use Grammarly or at least spell check. I saw so many variations of the word ‘embarrass’ that I don’t even believe in language anymore.”

In defense of her charitable mission, Brimmel remarked “none of those kids will even be able to tell if what I’m teaching them is wrong, so like why does it matter. And it’s not even like they’re going to use English that much anyways. They live in Cambodia, you guys. Cambodia. Where they speak Cambodian.” The single official language of the country is Khmer, but as Kelly Brimmel wrote in her Instagram story last week, “I’m not emmbbarrassed to make mistakes and make others learn those mistakes. Chi-Pat, Cambodia: see you soon.”

When asked about his prospective teacher, Hun Visna, an elementary student at Aoba School, commented “I actually received a perfect score on my PSAT.” Visna is a recipient of the Grammarly Scholarship, an award for “students who exhibit excellence at the English language and all its syntactical nuance.” Visna noted, “we all start from somewhere. I’m excited to teach Ms. Brimmel how to spell embarrassed.”