I have a rant of my own on the topic, but it'll have to wait until later, or I'll be late for work....
2 hours ago
Monday, January 12, 2009
Phonetics strike again
Ninja Medic did a piece on one of my pet peeves (and did a better job than I probably would have), so go check out When pore spelers atack. I'm hoping she gives us more on the subject!
2 comments:
I'm a terrible speller. But, I do know how to use spell check and Google. If I'm desperate I will even go old school and dig out a dictionary.
Jay, I suspect that part of the problem may be that most of those folks aren't just bad spellers, but are damn near functionally illiterate. And that shouldn't happen in this country, not in the 21st century! (Whether you're a good speller or not is irrelevant when you have the tools available to assist when memory fails; you're literate, and that's the important thing!)
I'm not qualified to speculate on what proportions of the FAIL should properly be attributed to the schools and teachers, to the students themselves, to the parents, and to the popular culture in general. A piss-poor teacher (and I have suffered with a few, both as a student and as a parent!) can make the brightest student wonder if the effort is worth it. The best teacher can't force an unmotivated student to learn. Neither can make much progress when a parent is completely uninterested in the child's education.
Then there are the schools (and teachers) that pass failing students on to the next level. They're a big contributor to the dumbing down of America. I graduated from high school with a star football player who freely admitted that he only read on a 4th grade level, yet he kept getting promoted on to the next grade, year after year. I ca only assume that his performance on the field was more important than his performance in the classroom, so far as the school was concerned!
One of my own children should have been held back in grade school - and the principal flatly refused to do it, despite parental advocacy of the plan. They didn't want to harm his self-esteem, we were told. More like they didn't want to damage their stats! Needless to say, we moved both kids to another school system, where he repeated a grade and was much better off for the experience!
Some of these kids have no real incentive to learn, not when they see overpaid sports figures and Hollywood celebs lionized, educators underpaid, and people with PhD.s bagging burgers at McFatFood. I personally know of one case where an individual with a H.S. diploma and 1 year's experience in a mfg. plant made twice what the individual's parent made after 20 years as an educator with an M.A.! Tell me there's not something inherently wrong with that...
I have a B.S. (mathematics), but have spent most of my working life in minimum wage jobs. A degree guarantees an individual nothing these days, not even an interview. That's a lot of time, effort and money to spend on something that you may not see as being of benefit to you, especially in a culture that seems to increasingly emphasize physical beauty and sexuality over intelligence and education. One can only hope that there are still enough of us who find intelligence sexier than 6-pack abs to keep the species from breeding itself back into the swamps...
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