I’m taking classes to become an elementary school teacher. One of the classes I’m taking is Language Arts: I should be learning in the class how to teach children to read, write, listen, speak, and otherwise become proficient users of language. It’s a very important class, I think: we should be reading linguistics, developmental psychology, the writings of the great pedagogues, and so forth.
Here are the things I’ve learned in the class from the professor:
-In the word “dog,” the morpheme is “og.”
-In the verb “record,” the stress is on the first syllable.
-When “vt” appears in a dictionary after a word like “befoul,” it stands for “verb transitive.”
-In the word “beforehand,” the “o” makes the sound represented by the schwa.
All of these are horribly wrong, and they’re just a small sample. I suspect that many students will leave her class more ignorant than when they entered.
But today she took the cake, stomped on it, smeared it in my hair, and cackled like a demon.
She was teaching about traits of good writing, and moved to the subject of vocabulary. So far, so good: certainly proficient writers wield the language with skill and precision and have a wide arsenal from which to choose.
She explained it thus (and this is a quote): “Wordsmithery: it’s an acronym for choosing the right word at the right time.”
Y’all are wondering what’s wrong with our educational system? I got an idea.
This reminds me of a crazy professor I had in undergraduate.
The Spanish word for “English/ Englishman” is inglés (note the accent). The word ingle(s) (no accent) means “inner thigh/ crotch”. The similarity (according to crazy prof) was because English soldiers raped women a lot, so the word for “crotch” was applied to “Englishman”.
The Spanish word for “Germany” is Alemania. The Spanish word for “wild beast” is alimaña, so clearly, the Spanish thought the Germans to be savage barbarians and named the country accordingly.
This is all complete bullshit.
In graduate school, I almost sent my linguistics professor into hysterics when I asked him if these “etymologies” were true.
My sympathies, LHOD.
You need to beat a path to the door of the Dean of Academics. You may also want to consider taking a tape recorder to class. Most professors will grant permission to tape lectures.
When I was teaching, I once had to sit through an inservice meeting in which a college professor claimed that automobile was a compound noun – even after she was challenged by a group of high school language arts teachers.
I agree on the “vt.” thing. I never actually checked but I always assumed it meant “transitive verb” and the v came first either because the fact that it was a verb was more important than the fact that it was transitive, or because the abbreviation came from Latin or something.
I’m a senior in high school, months from graduation. If I don’t know what you mean by “morpheme,” is that a terribly bad thing?
I agree with Zoe about the tape recorder, and I sincerely hope the teacher doesn’t forbid them. If they do, keep a piece of paper next to you in class at all times, and jot down verbatim anything relevant.
My favorite story is my biology teacher claiming that when water boils, the hydrogen and oxygen separate. Also notable was a group of students (not a teacher, although the teacher didn’t correct them) claiming, “This is the flag of Africa.”
:smack: I am an idiot–some sort of meta-Gaudere’s Law has struck me. She asked a student what it stood for. He guessed, “verb tense?” and she agreed, pointing out that “befouled, -ing” followed and that these were examples of verb tenses. It does, of course, stand for “verb transitive”: I just got my mental wires crossed when recounting the story.
Naw, you don’t really need to know what a morpheme is, although it’s an interesting concept. She, however, needs to know what one is, because:
She’s teaching people about language arts, and it’s an important concept for language arts pedagogy; and
She’s telling people what it means.
For the record, a morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a word (that’s a very rough definition). Stephen Pinker uses the example of “unmicrowavability,” a word with four morphemes: un, micro, wave, and ability. (I wonder whether “ability” could be further divided into “able” and “ity,” but I’m not sure). She even told us, in this case, that people had changed what it meant since she was in school and acknowledged that modern authors didn’t always agree that “og” was the morpheme is “dog.” I looked it up later: the word was invented in, I believe, the nineteenth century, and it’s not changed from its original meaning.
I’m not likely to take a tape recorder to class. I am, however, keeping a record of the ridiculous things she tells us. I keep thinking, “I’m paying money for THIS? I’ve cut my work hours and wages back to attend THIS?” I thought the literature professor at my last school (who interrupted us literally every three minutes while we read out-of-context sections of a text of phonetics so that we could draw pictures of the abstract academic concepts we were reading about) was awful, but she was Maria Freakin Montessori compared to this lady.
Which is why, to date, I have taken no “education” courses whatsoever. From everything that I have heard from my colleagues, education professors seem to be the only group that can make science/engineering professors look like they can teach. I also think like you, in that I wholeheartedly believe that there really could be useful education courses. I have yet to hear anything about them, though.
I think that this kind of thing gives us the next line in the saying:
LHoD, if I could presume to offer you some advice, I would say that you should place every course you take into two categories: useful and bullshit. Sadly, you’ll find too many in the wrong category, but at least you won’t worry about trying to gain anything useful from them.
LHoD, sounds like your instructor should be (re-)taking the class rather than teaching it. The real question for me, were I in your place, is whether she is representative of instructors for this type of class. If no, she should be reported to her department head. If yes, then “Houston, we have a problem.”
[hijack] Go, now, to the library or a bookstore and get Jasper Fforde’s series of books about Thursday Next. The first is The Eyre Affair. By the time you get to the third, The Well of Lost Plots, you will know everything about the English language that there is to know. And laugh yourself silly.[/hijack]
