Say what??

I have a friend who often says "the world is ruled by high school drop outs."  I totally understand what she means, everywhere you go you have to deal with people who drop particles and always want to ax you something.  Store clerks, some waiters, anywhere where you don't need a diploma you'll find people working there that don't have one.  It's a sad reality but don't let it get to you.  When people speak phonetically it just means they are somewhat illiterate - and yet it's not really their fault.  Best to write to your congressman.

I's dun c da problim, ur 2 sensyteeve englis as a furst langwage ees harrd.



I know what you mean. I have a better vocabulary then a lot people due to the amount of books I have read over the years. while I graduated high school and went to a vocational college for for computers. More people ask me about the grammatical structure of a sentence (or simple spelling) then my wife with her fancy pants degree. Although she does know anything I do about it and can construct a better resume then me.

Email actually hastened the decline of language, as folks developed more and more shortcuts and abbreviations. Then came texting, and all bets were off.

But all this just intensified a trend that has been going on since school became a place for social development rather than a place where you learn to read, write, and add.

About 25 years ago I was in Boston on business and went to visit my school. This is BU's School of Public Communication. One of my old professors told me, with disgust, that the single largest enrollment in any class was remedial reading.

Can you imagine? These kids wanted to be journalists, but couldn't put together a simple declarative sentence.

The matter of invented verbs is particular irksome to me. "Chef" is a noun, for instance, not a verb, and there's no more meaningless word than "cheffing."

lol, what about "sexting" or any one our ex-presidents made up words? Thinkify on that.

It is really sad that that joke is so very accurate. I dated a girl in High School whose mother talked like that all the time who was also proud of being pregnant at 16 and dropping out of High School. Coincidentally her daughter was really intelligent. Stupidity must skip generations.

Yes the written word is not written in stone anymore. Wow I must be getting old ....I sound like my parents! When my son was a teen ..I would over hear him chatting with his buddies and not really understand most of what they were saying ....It's their world now ,they are our future presidents! Scary ? You bet!   My daughter on the other hand is a Journalism student so she is always politically correct as well as just always correct!
I have a good command of the English Language .... .... but it does not help when keys  stick while emailing !

I wonder if we put Einstein in front of a computer today, if he could figure it out?

(You know, he could not spell)

food for thought   

Gypsy

The language was never written in stone, Gypsy. It evolves. New words enter, and old words change meanings. But when it reaches the point where we no longer communicate, then it isn't language anymore.

We shouldn't confuse language with cant and jargon, though. Those are subsets of English, used by specific groups to set themselves apart.

F'rinstance, you were a teen, once. And shared a "secret" language with your peers. How much of that language do you still use? Same goes for trade groups. Even those of us involved in the culinary arts have our own language. But it isn't regular English, and we don't expect that regular folks necessarily know what we're talking about. The ultimate in that has to be diner speak.

Well not to be anul but the first written word was in stone ( a tablet as they called it then) and  well we all know what happened to those who would not conform!
Conform to the norm is not for this Gypsy ....Being in the kitchen for so many years it's a given. Some of the best people in the world I have worked with could hardly speak English. They were so good at what they did I didn't care....Accountability and can you work together as a team and groove in that kitchen ....I don't judge anyone....only if you cannot walk the walk ...talk is cheap 

Back to the grind

Gypsy

A quote comes to mind here:

  "If we would please in society, we must be prepared to be taught many things we already know by people who do not know them."

Whats the betting, Presentate will become a "word" along with all the other oditties that are finding their way into the oxford dictionary... If it's said often enough, It becomes real. Strange, but true.
How many examples can you think of?

Needless to say, being illiterate doesn't mean you're stupid.  There are illiterate people who are very very smart - they have to be to get by without reading and writing! 

I know lots of very literate stupid people.  Several former presidents in fact.

I had a teacher once who told me "If you can't do, teach.  If you can't teach, teach teachers."

Nor, for that matter, does literacy necessarily have anything to do with schooling.

If you're old enough to remember Eric Hoffer, you know what I mean. Hoffer was one of the intellectual darlings of the New Left, back in the '60s and '70s. A longshoreman by trade, he'd never been to school, but was widely read in numerous disciplines.

Somebody once said about him, "being self-educated, he never had to read a bad book." One of the truest indictments of the American education system I've ever heard.

I had a teacher once who told me "If you can't do, teach.  If you can't teach, teach teachers."

Lot's of variations on that one, KK. The original quote, from GB Shaw, was: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." Somebody later on added, "Those who can't teach teach teachers how to teach."

A former neighbor of mine was Al Cullum, who literally invented the concept of creative play (his term for the idea that there's no reason learning can't be fun). It's probably long out of print, but his book detailing the concept was called Push Back The Desks.

One quick example. He discovered, in his classroom, a trapdoor leading to an unused storage space. He cleaned it out, and tacked math problems to the walls. The kids then had to earn the right to go down into "King Tut's Tomb," with a flashlight, choose a problem, and solve it. Imagine that! Elementary students competing for the right to solve math problems. Amazing what you can do when you make a game out of it.

At any rate, he'd finally decided it would be nice to get his PhD, and enrolled in an Ed School of some repute for that purpose. He stopped attending after about three months, because he was appaled over what was being taught under the guise of teaching skills.

Well, waddayaknow. Still used copies of Push Back The Desks available from Amazon. If anyone's interested in reading it, you can find it here: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Push+Back+The+Desks&x=11&y=19

 Hofstra University in Long Island also gives a Refresher Course ?? in remedial reading..  Ask today who is vice pres. or for that matter whats 42 x 12  God Knows. I am glad I went to school when I did.

Remedial reading classes became quite common at the college level when then went to open enrollment, Ed. So it wasn't that, per se, that surprised me. 

What's shocking is that we're talking about kids who can't read or write coming to a school so they could become reporters. Just what do they think the job entails?

 Yes! it became common, because we lowered the standards of admission. The school I taught in( High School) we were not permitted to fail or hold a student back. We needed the room for new students.

Yeah, Ed. That's why the education business is so special.

They spend 8 years not teaching them basic skills, then go to conventions where they ponder the issue of "Why Johnny Can't Read." 

Strange how those of us who are not teachers had no problem understanding the answer. "Because you didn't teach him how, is why!"

I just had a meeting with the administrators at one of the schools where I teach.  We're putting together an end of the year performance and met to discuss the logistics.  They began the meeting telling us that the school ranked as the 8th best elementary school in nyc.    Horriffying!  My 3-6th graders at that school can hardly read!  Why on earth are they patting themselves on the back?

Pertaining to teaching- watch what's going on in New Jersey.

What is "going on" in New Jersey?

I feel if that you got handed Julia Childs cookbook in your freshman year and could master it by your senior year, you just might be able to graduate. Think about it.

Well, I agree there are teachers who are not good at there jobs ...just like any other profession. But dosn't reading start at home ? We cannot depend on the Education system for everything! We are the first to educate are children and keep up on the curriculum. Are we to depend on other people to teach everything?  Follow up is so important in anything our children attend.  I do not agree with every method of education my children received in school ...so I made sure I filled in the "gaps"

then we send them out into the world with our fingers crossed


Gypsy

The newly elected gov of NJ is pushing back against the spending that has made NJ the most taxed state in the union.  Christie has made it clear that the teachers union will have to make concessions.  But we're talking NJ here.  The unions there are very strong.

Teachers unions are being confronted across the country; it will be interesting as more states are interested in challenging the classical tenure based system.  More emphasis these days are on performance, not tenure. 

The money has run out; now we'll see the fallout.

john (who has many union member friends, so is not making a political statement)

Gypsy,

Even though I agree with you about supplementing education at home, I think we need to hold our teachers to a higher standard. My son attends public school due to his need for speech therapy.  I find it very frustrating that I have to correct his teacher's instructions for his homework. For example, they were studying about bats, part of his homework was to identify parts of the bat and write a few sentences about bats.  The portion regarding the sentences said to write something about the bathes.  Her grammar and spelling skills are horrendous yet she is teaching my child.
 
I understand that teachers are getting the short end of the stick as far as pay, class sizes and curriculum but at what cost?  We have more children that cannot read or write and the drop out rate is almost 80%. Yet when the state  or city is in need of money they cut money from education. It is sad to see people willing to pay more money on professional sports than education. We are creating a generation of people looking for handouts from the government and willing to blame others for their misfortunes.

I don't favour the direction education is taking either.  It does depend a lot on the quality of teacher that they have also.  My teens went to the same secondary school, both have quite a lot of the old gray matter clicking away.  The elder one did extremely well at English.  I believe it was 50% because of her inate ability, but 50% because the teacher actually cared to teach, and that with enthusiasm and knowledge.  Whereas my second teen - in the years he spent at high school and primary school, was never taught how to write an essay.  His teacher of 3 years actually said to him, "That's pathetic!" upon his prentation of an essay.  He is not stupid.  He's been exposed to pathetic teachers is what it is.  I despair for the education of our children.  I've always read to them as young kids, and helped where I could in later years.

The same thing is happening now with his music teacher in college - he loves music.  This teacher at his new college is so awful the whole class is thinking  of ditching it as a subject.   Whereas at high school he had a marvellous teacher and he learnt so much and was fired up, raring to go, every day he had a class of music.  He could be crook as a dog and on his last legs, but if music was in his schedule for the day, he would go, regardless,

Feel like banging my head against a wall somedays out of sheer despair......

Oi Gunnar - you should thank the powers that be for being married to someone almost as talented, intelligent and self impressed as yourself   I am kidding here big boy. Take it with a really large grain of salt.  (It tastes better),  Hey nothing wrong with fancy pants, they can look great.

On a more serious note (ok please take this in "the proof reader mucked this up" mode that is intended in, nothing  more or racial).  Penguin Books published a book on pasta dishes.  Ok - good - Penguin are respected.  Trouble was, instead of ground black pepper, the proof reader missed it.  They published it to read "ground black people".  Major oopsie there.  Point is - you can't just rely on spell-checker all the time.  They've taken it out of the stores and pulped them, so I guess anyone with a copy has a collectors item.  Silly mistake, that.

I don't disagree that it would be best to let go teachers based on merit.  But don't doubt for a second that if they get their way on this they'll be doing that.  Oh no, what they're really after is to disband the unions and cut the teachers with the higher salaries.  That's the plan.

When I began as a teacher I got so much help from veteran teachers.  There is so much to learn from them.  So what if they make more money than new teachers?  It's still not a competitive salary compared to other professions. 

If they're going to be firing teachers based on merit then they'll have to come up with a way to evaluate that which is fair.  I've been in schools where the administration hates certain teachers.  So to make them suffer they give them a class full of all the students that no other teacher wants - the lowest performing and worst behaved.  By the end of the year that teacher has so much stacked up against her/him that if they were to fire her based on the test scores of her class she'd be the first to go.  Is that fair?

That is precisely the problem with merit based systems, KK: Who determines the standards, and who holds the teachers against them?

If and when that can be established, then we can go on to merit.

The problem, as I see it, is that many teachers just don't care. It's a job to them, nothing more, nothing less. And many of them, due to the way the system is set up, are totally unqualified to be in the classrooms they run.

But it goes even deeper. Teachers, themselves, are products of the modern education system. And as such, many of them are barely more literate than the kids they are teaching.

Here's an example that really sums it up. Back when my kids were still in school there was a teacher's strike. Frankly, the espoused issue was not one that a professional union would have gone on strike over. But the point is, no matter the issue, there was a no-strike clause in the contract.

When I discussed this with some of the teachers---including the union rep---I was floored by the response. "How come you're on strike, when there's a no-strike clause," I asked. "That was last year's contract," they replied, "and doesn't apply anymore."

Say what? We're entrusting our children to these people. People who, apparently, could neither read nor comprehend something they had agreed to.

We cannot depend on the Education system for everything!

Gypsy, I agree with your contention, but not your example. The only things we should depend on the education system for is to teach the little buggers to read and to add. Everything else is our job. Unfortunately, they spend so much time on tasks they've abrogated from parents that there's none left to perform those two basic jobs.

Teaching, like working in a kitchen, like so many jobs these days; there are good people who are passionate and work hard to do the right thing. There are also people in it for a paycheck.
But I do know in many cases that the teachers hands are tied because they have a plan written up by the state, or powers that be and they have to follow that no matter how lame it might be.
Let's rephrase "Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into politics and decide what you should do"