rock paper scissors

[Mike Cash]

paul_b wrote:

Mike Cash wrote:
The internet makes it abundantly obvious to me that they no longer make much effort at teaching spelling either.

That's alright, I never made much effort to learn spelling.

Absent effort, osmosis is better than nothing.

When it comes to spelling, the worst slackers from my day seem to do better than many of the diligent students of today.

[flammable hippo]

Mike Cash wrote:
When I was in school, our English classes were divided up with half the year being spent on literature and half the year on grammar. That was from the 7th through 12th grades.

Oh, for the past couple of years we've been doing almost nothing but literature based work. It beats grammar lessons by a long shot but I still think that more variety should be added to our classes. We've just finished reading Beowulf and now we have to write an essay on it (how predictable...).

[Mike Cash]

flammable hippo wrote:

Mike Cash wrote:
When I was in school, our English classes were divided up with half the year being spent on literature and half the year on grammar. That was from the 7th through 12th grades.

Oh, for the past couple of years we've been doing almost nothing but literature based work. It beats grammar lessons by a long shot....

If it is any consolation to you, the greybeards bemoaning the demise of English grammar education in American schools by-and-large had exactly the same opinion.

I even remember at the beginning of the school year the English teacher giving the class a choice of which to do first, literature or grammar. There were always the "let's put it off as long as possible in the hopes we'll die before spring" and the "let's get the nasty bit out of the way so we won't have it to dread" camps.

[JadeFire19]

In my school, whatever grammar they teach is geared towards what's going to be on the SATs and PSATs. They never say "a lot of people get this wrong" they just say "there will be questions like this on the SAT." English class is no longer a class with a focus on the English language. It should be renamed "Literature and SAT prep" or something like that. I mean really, in the long run, which matters most: knowing how to speak/write correctly or knowing how to recognize that two characters in a book are foils to each other?

Sadly enough, I learn more about English grammar in my Spanish class than I do in my English class.

[richvh]

The best thing an English class could do is instill a love of reading. Unfortunately, most don't (even 30 years ago they didn't, though I think they did a better job of teaching grammar); my own love of reading was self-inflicted.

[AJBryant]

For me, it was a love of *writing.*

I can't imagine anyone writing the stuff I see here every day in term papers or reports and *not* getting it back all marked up as wrong, with a "fix this or you get an F" note on the paper.


Tony

[keatonatron]

I guess I had a pretty good education. I wasn't aware that everyone else is missing out.

I went to a private school from 7th-8th grade, and learned more about the English language from my strict, strict teacher than I did in my 4 years of high school.

Even so, (speaking of spelling), in my 10th grade English class we had a section focused on the proper way to pluralize things and make them possessive, and it was a requirement for everyone to get 100% on a 100-question test. If you missed even one, you had to do the whole thing over again until you got it right.

I think my biggest pet peeve is when people misuse quotation marks--especially when they use them to make things stand out (the job of italics or bold). The worst is when some company paints a cartoon character on their window, saying some advertising phrase (in a speech bubble), and they put it in quotation marks. That would mean the character isn't saying it, but simply quoting someone else! (If it was the company's slogan it would be okay, but it's always stuff like "Try our delicious hot dogs for 2.99 each!")

Even the cartoon character knows he's just a tool with words being put in his mouth. It's smart of him to not claim them as his own

[two_heads_talking]

I believe it was in the 80's when whole language was introduced into the corriculum and ever since then, spelling, grammar, and the like have taken a huge downward spike. By 1985, when I graduated from HighSchool, I noticed that my younger brothers' and sisters' English papers no longer had spell correction, but spelling suggestions. They were told to do the best they could, and give it an honest try, but were never corrected. My 3 youngest sisters, all in their late 20's can't spell to save their lives.

We were watching the Snoopy episode with the spelling "B" in it and with Charlie singing, "I before E except after C or in words like.... etc. etc. They asked me how I knew the song. To which I replied" That episode of Snoopy is old enough that I learned it while in gradeschool.

[clay]

A cartoon called Drabble:

Student: "Professor Wilson, between you and I..."
Professor: "No, no... The correct phrasing is 'between you and ME'"
Student: "I could care less!"
Professor: "No, you couldN'T care less! Get it right, Mr. Drabble!"
Student: "Well, now I feel badly."
Professor: "No, no, no... You feel bad not badly!!"
Student: (thinking) "It's fun and easy to drive an English teacher berserk!"

[Kagemaru]

A concerning thought...

How many of these culprits are teaching English to Japanese people?

[Ellie]

Wow, from a discussion of rock, paper, scissors to bemoaning the state of the education system. Nice jump.

I also work for a University, but in the UK, and we have several writing courses (i.e. these students wish to become professional authors of fiction/non-fiction books ). I read a couple of their courseworks last year and could spot at least 10 spelling/grammatical errors per page on many of them (and they were typed, so the spelling mistakes were of the there/their etc variety. I would not like to have seen them without being spell checked!).

I don't really know what the cause is though, as I'm only 23 myself, so have experienced the same educational system as these students, yet manage to string a sentence together reasonably well.