Gerard Nolst Trenité (1870-1946), who wrote under the pseudonym of Charivarius, was a Dutch writer, traveler and teacher. In 1922 he wrote The Chaos (also often known by its opening line, Dearest Creature in Creation) which is a poem featuring around 800 of the most awkwardly and counter-intuitively spelled words in English as a way of helping students with their pronunciation.This is a long poem so it's best not to just hand it out and let the class get on with it. One idea is to break up the class into small groups and give each group a verse to analyze. Later, bring the class together again and have people try to say another group's verse followed by correction. Give one verse each to every student in the class to learn for homework to be repeated to the class in the following lesson. This can be turned into a team event to see who can say their verse faultlessly and know the meaning of every word they have just said!
