Capitol only has one meaning, it’s the building.
Capital letters, capital city, and capital assets all use the “a”.
Pretty hard to screw up.
I see forward / foreword screwed up a lot too. Foreword refers to the beginning part of a book.
I once had an English Translation teacher (in professional school) who misused “disinterested” for “uninterested” in an assignment. sigh
Back in the mid 1980’s Clinton was my governor. He appointed Hillary to chair an education panel. They put together a law that required teacher testing. It wasn’t all that hard. They just wanted to raise the standards. At that time many of the older black teachers had been educated in segregated schools in the 1940’s and early 1950’s. The schools were underfunded and not very good. Teacher testing gave everyone a chance to brush up on stuff they hadn’t studied in 30 plus years.
Well, the teacher’s union went ape shit. :eek: They thought it was a slap in their face. But, they put together some summer brush up classes (taught by volunteers). Most teachers passed the test and some retired.
The law was repealed after a few years. The teacher’s union has a lot of power.
It’s funny that as a computer analyst, I’m always expected to study and stay current. I’ve earned certification in several areas. I don’t see why teachers don’t do the same.
I recently had to tolerate this.
All of the printed material is like that. You’d think at some point, someone would tell the guy… but it seems that the sort of people who take these courses have a high tolerance for this sort of abuse.
That’s a pretty common error and is very frequently made in professional writing. I’d venture to say at least nine in ten English speakers don’t know the difference.
I’m not saying it’s not an error, but I wouldn’t question someone’s literacy for that one. A teacher who puts apostrophes in plurals, now that’s concerning.
At work I have to read a lot of questionnaires that have been filled out by teachers. You wouldn’t BELIEVE the atrocious grammar and spelling I’ve seen. How these people passed English 101 is beyond me.
This bothers me more than the others. I mean, it’s one thing for teachers just to use improper grammar/spelling. It’s another when they actually correct incorrectly.
Sounds like a case of picking nits to me, since they now share a definition. It’s one of the many cases where neither one is wrong, but one is more right than the other. “I feel nauseous,” and “I feel nauseated,” being another example of that gray area.
Only if he is a person of principle.
Many years ago, my mother mentioned to my sister’s 2nd Grade teacher that we were going to Gettysburg over spring vacation. To which she replied, “oh, Virginia is lovely this time of year.”
Is your last name Lee? Maybe she was just remembering how the last Lee expedition to Gettysburg turned out.
While I realize that the whole I-was-smarter-than-my-teacher-nya-nya-nya refrain is bread-and-butter for the Dope, I feel that spelling and punctuation (especially on a social networking site) should be of less concern than simply not understanding pedagogy.
Some of the best spellers in the classroom don’t know much about actually teaching.
It’s just that she was holding herself out as someone who teaches English to people in the running to become language professionals. You’d think she would have at least heard of the rule, which she completely failed to recognize when I brought it up with her.
I’ve got many stories of grade-school teachers saying or doing things that indicate they’re not as smart as some of the kids. My favorite is the teacher who spelled Egypt “Eygpt” and could not accept that he was wrong even when shown the evidence in two dictionaries. He made a point of announcing to the class that he had found his spelling in an older dictionary.
Some years back I attended a performance by The Capitol Steps. After the show I was standing in line to buy a CD, and the person in front of me was writing out a check. She looked up at the guy behind the table (a member of the troupe) and asked whether “Capitol” should be spelled with an a or an o. The guy shrugged his shoulders and said he had no idea. Considering that all members of The Capitol Steps are former (or current) congressional staff workers, you’d think *they *would know the difference.
For the record, “capitol” is derived from the Capitolium (also known as the Capitoline Hill), the highest of Rome’s seven hills and the site of its most important temples. “Capital”, is derived from capit, meaning “head”. The difference is largely in the minds of proscriptive wordsmiths, however, as Capitolium ultimately derived from capit as well.
Well, if you are okay with average class sizes of several hundred…
“Those who can’t do, teach”
There’s no hard and fast rule requiring one to reserve “disinterested” for the ethical sense of “impartial; free from improper interest.” It is at best a preference advanced by a minority of modernizing reformers. If you open any decent dictionary, you’ll see that disinterested has a few common meanings, first among them the sense of “bored; uninterested.”
What’s the problem with that? I’ve lectured to classes of that size before…
Seriously, though, in my mind the other part of “firing the bad teachers” is hiring potentially better ones to take their place.I don’t know how the job market is for education majors. If we’re barely able to keep current staffing levels as is, then simply “firing the bad ones” wouldn’t be a good solution, I agree.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the results and a quick Google search turned up some info to verify my statement, but not to the extent I would like. Last time I read an in-depth article on the topic, education majors were just a little above sociology majors. They were certainly lower than the 25th percentile. When I have some more time I’ll try to dig up some fairly recent stats. What I just found had education majors at next-to-lowest, just barely above aviation majors for some school in TN.