We got the one about B.C. for Before Christ and A.D. for After Death too. And I would just like to say that if I wasn’t madly in love with Sampiro before, I certainly am now. That was beautiful, man.
Thank you! I was thinking about this the other day when posting to another thread. I realized that I honestly didn’t know that Jack, John, Robert, and Bobby Kennedy were only two people.
It occured to me that I have never had any history class cover the 20th century. Every year they would start around the Jamestown era, get to about 1910 by the end of the semester, and run out of time to go any further. I swear the only reason I know ANY 20th century history is playing alot of war video games and watching war movies (not the best place to be educated about such monumental events). A poll of my friends shows that half couldn’t even name the major players in World War 1. I really wish I was a better writer so I could write a book that is fun to read and covers all the history that high schools seem to completely gloss over.
I hear ya. History class in 6th and 11th grade was nice because that was when we learned World History and it was such a relief to get away from the pilgrims up to the civil war.
World history? What, you mean like Mexico? 
Seriously, it angers up my blood every time I realize we never learned any history apart from American and ancient greece/rome (and even that was mostly learning mythology).
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in my angry dome.
Actually Bobby Kennedy Jr. goes by Robert, so it’s even more confusing than you thought.
My 6th grade math teacher, re demos:
“Math doesn’t have any logic. Just learn it.”
It’s been 28 years and I’m still trying to recover…
Modern linguistic thinking generally divides sounds into just vowels and consonants. The sounds most commonly represented by ‘w’ and ‘y’ are consonants. You’re right that the concept of letters representing vowels is flawed, though; that “sometimes Y” business is garbage. I never liked it, even as a small child who knew nothing of the formal study of linguistics.
Well, there’s GNU, DVD, etc. Not exactly the universe of IT, but since he apparently doesn’t know that much anyway…
<Off topic>
The 1992-1995 Porsche 968 had a 3.0L inline four cylinder engine, which at the time it was the largest and most powerful production 4 cylinder engine ever. To counter the vibration from the large displacement engine the 968(as well as the 1983-1991 944 which had a 2.5-2.7L I4) made use of contra-rotating belt driven balance shafts licensed from Mitsubishi.
<On topic>
My 5th grade teacher swore that cursive writing would be required in Jr. High and High school. I don’t think I’ve ever written any cursive since 6th grade. :rolleyes:
It wasn’t until I was in high school/college that I really began to understand why the Colonial Line troops were necessary. As devastating as the irregular tactics that the Minutemen used on the march from Concord, they had no effect on the actual battles fought. Even the battle of Bunker Hill, one of the few real cases were a militia fought regular troops in an actual battle was a defeat for the colonists. (Granted a “victory” for the British that General Gage claimed could lose the war if they had two more like it.)
The biggest lies I can recall were from my second grade teacher. She was a Chauvinist, of the Boston flavor, so EVERYTHING was about Boston. “What’s the real Windy City? Boston!” “What’s the real city that Never Sleeps? Boston!” Heck, it’s because of her that I doubted that Boston had actually been called the Hub of the Universe at one point. If she were lying about all those others, why not that, too?
Hear. For six years, we were forced to write in cursive. Everybody hated it. As soon as it wasn’t required, we all stopped doing it. I’ve never done it since. This is a huge lie, spanning decades and continents. And people say conspiracy theorists are nuts. They just focus on the wrong things.
We learned these concepts in second grade, and 7-year-olds are not equipped to examine syntactic roles. They think in a very concrete fashion.
Daniel
Ah, but what year were you told that? I was reminded recently that there was a movement during the Carter Administration for the US to go metric eventually.
Yes, IMAGINE! – the ONE TRUE NATION finally conceding that the English measuement system was second-class in almost every way, and meekly joining the rest of the world… HEAVEN FORBID!
But when Carter lost quite a bit of credibilty and clout (after the failed hostage rescue and Soviet incursion into Afghanistan) the idea lost its main champion, and was shelved.
God’s own country was saved from unpatriotic sanity!
It’s just that if your teacher made the statement sometime in the late '70’s it would certainly be understandable.
True Blue Jack
How do you figure? The three most common sounds represented by Y are in the words “yell”, “by” and “carry”. In “yell”, it’s a consonant, and in “by” and “carry” it’s a vowel. Now, there may be some level of uber-precise linguistics at which everything I just said was meaningless garbage, but there’s also a level of commonly understood useful usage in which everything I said was exactly right.
When we teach children numbers in arithmetic, are we lying to them because we say “four is THIS many apples” instead of “four is a member of a series of sets defined as the natural numbers which we start out by defining with the following 7 axioms…” or whatever?
DVD stands for Digital Video Disc and/or Digital Versatile Disc.
Strangely, in another thread where I suggested teaching math along these lines, someone compared it to teaching kids that the tooth fairy would gather their lost teeth and leave them money. I think there’s a divide between folks who have taught young kids and those who have not…
Daniel
First, I want to apologize to the OP for this continued hijack, and say to you (I haven’t been on 'net in a couple of days) that I’m gonna stop now.
I’d love to talk more about the finer points of this but I have admit I’m out of my league (MaxTheVool seems to be better at expressing my ideas). Just wanted you to know I didn’t run away from the exchange. It seems to me though, that “Triangles have three sides” means “Triangles exist in a state of three-sidedness.” Either that or, “Kilroy was here.”
Well, I haven’t yet thought of an egregious new “lie” in my lair (perhaps I had good teachers, or perhaps I have a poor memory), but just to respond to things on the old one…
Well, perhaps the concept shouldn’t be taught in second grade, then. What is the purpose of knowing what part of speech a word is except insofar as to examine syntactic roles? Why do we want 7 year olds to be able to categorize words by part of speech?
And, to 5-4-Fighting, though it’s not really fair for me to keep talking to you about it when you’ve said you intend to stop, I think if mere existence is to be accepted as a concrete action, as “doing something”, then the concept of “doing something” is so diluted as to be unhelpful in this sort of analysis. (Note, incidentally, that “existence” is a noun, despite apparently being an action (also a noun), while the essentially semantically identical “exist” is a verb). You just can’t usefully determine part of speech by examining meaning; “John hungers”, “John has hunger”, and “John is hungry” all mean the exact same thing, despite employing a verb, a noun, and an adjective, respectively.
For a variety of reasons. You want to be able to teach students to write in complete sentences, which requires another set of oversimplifications (“Every sentence has a subject and a verb”). You also want to be able to teach students about foreign languages, sometimes; at the school where I did my student teaching, students begin learning Spanish in third grade. You also want to be able to teach students about irregular plurals, and it’s helpful if they know what a noun is. You also want to be able to teach students about more complex grammatical concepts in later years without having to start from scratch: education involves spirals, not straight lines, in which the same material is covered in ever-increasing complexity as students progress through school.
Daniel
Well, that right there is already introducing the concept of subject and predicate, and thus discussion of syntactic roles. There doesn’t seem any need to obfuscate the matter at this point by pretending that subjects have to be concrete, tangible objects; by that age, kids already have a decent grasp on speaking their native language anyway, and realize well enough that one can say things like “Rest is good for the body”, despite rest being neither a person, place, thing, or idea (except in such a liberal sense as that all words refer to things and/or ideas).
Yeah, learning a foreign language is the main area where anyone finds formal grammar useful. I still think there’s no need to lie about what nouns are, and that kids could handle a more accurate definition; if they’re learning Spanish, they’re already beginning to learn some assignment of syntactic properties to words in a manner far abstracted from their meaning, and largely arbitrary (e.g., grammatical gender); I think they could handle learning that being a noun isn’t the same as referring a tangible object or “idea”. They’ll already be seeing that some meanings which are usually expressed using one part of speech in English are usually expressed with another part of speech in other languages (e.g., English “I am hungry” with an adjective vs. French “J’ai faim” with a noun), and thus exposed very directly to the fact that parts of speech can’t be determined from meaning.
Of course, not all nouns can pluralize (e.g., “garbage”, “cattle”), so if you feel the need to bring up lexical categories at all, then what you really want to get at is the concept of “count noun”. Which is, again, not semantically determined (compare count noun “cow” to mass noun “cattle”; or consider the mass noun “rice”, a concept which hardly seems different, in terms of countability, from that of the count noun “peas”). But, at any rate, I don’t see how knowing what nouns/count nouns are would help in learning the irregular plurals of a handful of special words here and there. Heck, you could pretty much write up all those words on a sheet of paper, hand it out and discuss those particular words, and never bother to mention nouns at all. (Frankly, I think you’d even be ok not formally covering the irregular plurals in the first place; I’d be surprised if an uneducated man could reach the age of 20 and still say “mouses” and “mooses” and “knifes”. You’d pick it up by osmosis from the language of your peers, just as you do with almost all of language, rather than from being taught in school. Still, let’s not get into all of that…)
Yeah, this is the strongest point; however, in this case, I think the early lie is hard to remove and often more damaging than useful later on. You’ll see adults getting the matter wrong because of this lie; for example, Jon Stewart’s “We declared war on terror; it’s not even a noun, so, good luck.”
(Man, don’t get me started on the even more widespread tradition considering determiners (e.g., “the”, “many”, “my”) to be adjectives, a vestigial error which refuses to die)
:eek:
I must have completely blocked that out because I’d forgotten about it until the moment of reading your post. I practically had a Wayne’s World style cheesy flashback with the teacher explaining this awesome strategery, and to my “WTF…?” fifth grade self, explaining cheerily that the Revolutionists learned it from the Indians. She said that the British were so locked in to the pagentry of battle that they’d line up in a row, shoulder to shoulder across the middle of the field and shoot, staying in formation in front of god and everybody to reload, while the clever Americans and their Indian pals hid behind trees and boulders and picked them off.