Education and the “Educated” – Who Do I Pit?

The BBQ Pit
21

Yes, I pointed out many of her errors and tried to explain the corrections. Unfortunately, I think by this time many of these things are wired in, and a one-time correction just isn’t going to stick.

Well for one reason, that is the teacher’s JOB!

OK, truth be told, she is actually my step-daughter, who came on the scene when she was 15. During her first year of school here, 10th grade I think, I had noticed this lack of basic English skills in her writing. I asked her high school teacher whether they were stressing these skills in the curriculum and was told that they were much more concerned with the students getting their thoughts on paper and didn’t want to criticize grammar and mechanics for fear of inhibiting the writing process.

22

I recently had a professional copyeditor work on something I had written. During the preliminary email exchanges with this guy, I was trying to warn him that my document was not going to have perfect grammar. In fact, I expected that he’d be slashing it up quite a bit, correcting lots of things. I emphasized that he’d probably have his work cut out for him.

But after he saw my manuscript, he lowered his price quote. I guess he had expected something much worse. I couldn’t figure out why at first, because I am not kidding myself—my writing and grammar are not that wonderful. Not horrible, but not wonderful. But I am now guessing that this guy lowered his price quote because he had initially expected (based on my own description) that my document would be some abysmal horror. And apparently, it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. Which leads me to believe that he has had to deal with some abysmal terrors in his professional career. :eek:

I was really shocked because I . . . I don’t know. I thought my writing was pretty ordinary / bad. But apparently there are plenty that are much worse. Scary, huh?

23

My sister teaches freshman (college) English, and it’s a fun family activity for us to sit around, read some of the worst of the worst papers, and laugh hysterically.

However, in her class, she’s not supposed to worry about spelling, grammar, or punctuation at all. The idea is just to get these kids used to writing. Many have never written anything longer than a page before. So each paper they write has a specific set of criteria on which they’re graded, and she has to just ignore any technical errors. Theoretically, they’ll get to that stuff in higher-level English classes, which may or may not happen.

24

(Eve cries softly to herself . . .)

25

Hot damn!

Finally, my writing skills are adequate. The best part is I didn’t have to do anything beyond waiting for everyone else’s standards to slip. I put forth absolutely zero effort, and suddenly I are a gooder writer.

Behind every cloud…

26

Okay, climb onto the first rung. Did you know that an ellipsis only has three dots? :wink:

27

It would be pleasant to believe that this is a recent development, and that everyone used to know how to write before MTV and CNN. Unfortunately, in my experience that is not the case. I’ve had a lot of jobs - 37 at last count, including temp assignments and part-time teaching gigs. I’ve worked with accountants, architects, engineers, librarians, marketing managers, purchasing managers, sales managers, and of course the requisite fast-food and retail managers.

Dey cain’t rite.

Librarians can’t spell, marketers won’t punctuate, and engineers - whoo doggies!

And I’m not talking about kids, I’m speaking of adults. People who would’ve gotten their degrees in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The only particularly notable exception was an accountant for whom I worked. Of course, she was thinking of becoming a lawyer - and the lawyer I temped for wrote reasonably well (although he wouldn’t wear shoes in the office, preferring instead to run around barefoot). Hmmm. Perhaps that’s why lawyers are running the show.

As to your daughter’s work applications and business writing, it seems unlikely that anyone will notice their flaws.

28

Preach it, Fessie! My favorite (or worst) examples of this: a couple of marketing reps I worked for at IBM. One of them, who graduated with honors coming out the wazoo, spelled “few” F-U-E. I shit you not.

The other was a successful marketing manager. He gave me a letter to type and it had a gazillion errors, spanning grammar, punctuation, spelling, and sentence structure. I corrected them like a good little admin. He returned it and told me to put the letter back to its original form.

“But, Rich! It’s wrong!”, I exclaimed.

Rich responded that he would rather be consistently wrong than right only once in a while.
It was at that moment I began calling him “Dick.”

29

Maybe I should count myself lucky. My 10th grade English teacher was a real hardass who got into the nitty-gritty of participles, gerunds, and other esoterica.

30

Maybe I should count myself lucky. My 10th grade English teacher was a real hardass who got into the nitty-gritty of participles, gerunds, and other esoterica.

31

I don’t know if it’s really true or not, but I’ve been told, when the Elder Teachers are feeling expansive, and we’re all gathered in the Teachers Lounge to hear the stories of days gone by… that things were… different, once.

That once upon a time, the sole judge of whether or not a kid was sufficiently educated was the school. Period. The politicians stayed the hell out of it, and the parents… well… the parents could complain, but they couldn’t actually do anything. If the kid couldn’t read and write, he couldn’t read and write, and he could jolly well stay in the first grade until he learned. Period.

It’s also said that when a kid was just such a pain in the butt that he could not be tolerated, they’d just expel him and be done with it, rather than “alternative placement,” or “behavior unit” or “suspension” or “In-school suspension” or any number of other possibilities.

Most importantly, the sole judge of a teacher’s competence was the school district. A teacher would be watched and supervised by the administrators, who would decide if that teacher was actually doing the job or not, and how well that job was getting done. If the administrators felt that the teacher was competent, and that the curriculum and instruction were adequate, then half the class could fail, and it was no one’s fault but the students’.

Different beast nowadays. You see, in many school districts, if a teacher wishes to fail more than a very small percentage of his or her students, the teacher’s expected to justify why the students failed. Did the teacher try every possible alternative? Did the teacher contact each parent two or three times each six weeks? Were there parent conferences? Was individual instruction attempted?

…and when half your class is bombing out because no one gives a damn, and you simply don’t have TIME to do individual instruction, try alternatives, and have parent meetings morning, noon, and night… the temptation to simply pass the little buggers can be overwhelming. And the school district likes it that way. That way, they have to deal with a minimum of howling parents, while still insisting that their standards for teacher performance are high, high, high!

And that’s just ONE problem the teachers of today have to deal with…

32

Now, there is something to this. The writing process and the structure of English are two very different things, and a writing teacher really shouldn’t have to worry about grammar. However, the writer should. Trying to write without the proper knowledge of grammar and syntax is like trying to build a brick wall with bricks but no cement, or a sand castle with dry sand. You’ll just end up with a mess.

There need to be obligatory classes that concentrate only on grammar and usage, in college, high school, and elementary school. It’s very important, but writing teachers shouldn’t have to bother with it much.

33

I really think it is a generational gap based on the emergence of word processors. When my parents went to school, they were taught to write everything in perfect grammatical form, because if they didn’t they had to rewrite the whole thing.

I however grew up in the era of Word processors. Everything that I write, I write stream of thought put the meeting down on paper. Then I review to make sure the meaning came through and catch obvious glaring mistakes. If it’s a friendly email(or a post on this board :))then I usually let it go like that, because it’s in a more comfortable conversational tone. If it’s a business email I actively rewrite it to sound more professional and really proof-read. If it’s a real paper, like the thesis I just finished, I pretty much have to go back through and recompose every sentence to make sence and still be formal, I know how to do it, but it’s not a natural way of writting for me and it’s a momumental pain in the ass to use it. It’s cause I’m lazy. It is much easier to write the meaning, and much more difficult to bother with structure and grammer. And it’s just becomming les important in the world as people my age and temperment take over the world, and my people my parent’s age retire.

34

:eek: Oh boy, we’re sunk.

35

:walks off sobbing for the future of the world…:

Ava

36

I’m guessing I’m in your parents’ generation, as I grew up writing out longhand (or typing and re-typing). I don’t want to seem like I’m picking on you, as you appear to be a perfectly nice person and your post is not a particularly egregious example of bad writing, but I had to force myself through it to make a cogent response.

Just a heads-up - your meaning may not be “coming through” in the way you imagine it is when you write “naturally.” Mistakes that don’t seem to be obvious to you are not only glaring at others, but grabbing them by the collar and shaking them, while shouting in their ears. Don’t worry about it, we’ll all be dead eventually. I’m sure you’ll do fine and I hope you guys are all happy with the world of written language that you’re making for yourselves.

(On preview, this sounds snarky, but honestly, it’s not meant to be. I’m just kinda bemused by it all.)

37

My riting skillz r da b0mb0rz. :dubious:

38

Amen, my brother. I loved our ESL students when I was a tutor. Not only did they care enough to come in of their own volition, their papers were usually pretty decent. The native English speakers, the ones that had to be forced in by their teachers because they didn’t care enough to ask for help on their own? Forget it. And as a tutor, I never had time to explain to them why things were wrong, what the rules were, and how to fix things for themselves. I made my little red marks on the paper, and they toddled off to fix it on their own, and they never learned a thing.

Most of the kids I saw in the writing center were freshmen. They came in, did their required English credit, and were sent off into the world. One would expect that English majors, serious students of the language, would make a better showing. One would be wrong. Everyone in my senior writing seminar got an A- on everything, because we were good, but we could always use improvement. No shit we could use improvement. We also could’ve used a few lessons on compound sentences, proper use of the semicolon, and the difference between “to,” “too,” and “two.” I could go on for days.

What really kills me is that I learned all of this in the seventh grade. I learned to diagram sentences. I learned about independent clauses and dependent clauses and proper use of the apostrophe and semicolon and hyphen… We learned all the comma rules. We did it all. We were past nouns and verbs. We were doing prepositional phrases. We even dabbled our toes in the deep water that is MLA, in seventh grade, in a public school, in the early 1990s. So I know it’s not impossible to teach kids to write correctly, even kids as young as twelve. I know it because it happened, because I lived it. So why isn’t it happening in other schools? I don’t know.

It just seems like no one cares anymore, and it breaks my heart. The English language is capable of such beauty and depth, and no one even bothers to write clearly anymore. It just… it kills me. It really does.

39

I think this is actually worse than l337.

My written English is pretty good (At least I think so, though I wish I could say the same of my French :frowning: ). Not perfect, but I do know a lot of the gramar rules and punctuation. I had one English teacher that was borderline anal on certain things, and I’m not just talking about the written language. And several of my other teachers also bothered to teach us proper writing rules. For the record, I’m 19 and graduated high school last year.

Or maybe it’s just because I grew up in a rural area and computers and word processors didn’t become too common until high school.

Notes like that in the OP makes me want to go in and edit it personally. Notes like what I quoted make me want to bitch-slap the so-called author upside the head.

I think that anal English teacher rubbed off on me.

40

This is the attitude that depresses me.