Posted on 02/10/2015 6:30:03 AM PST by C19fan
Calculus? I can state with fair certainty that the author of this piece doesn’t even know that calculus exists or what it’s for. If she did, she would be bitching about it.
When the three “Rs” were being taught, I remember very few kids dropping out of school or not being able to read and write. But then, those kids mostly had two parents in real marriages that cared about their kids and wanted them to succeed in life.
“England and America are two countries divided by a common language.” said George Bernard Shaw (also used by Churchill) is a common joke regarding how the English language evolved differently in different places.
Dankon por memorigi min pri Esperanto. Mi devas spekti DVD mi aĉetis ĵus uzitaj de Amazon. Estas Inkubo, kun 1960 hororo filmo ĉefrolita William Shatner kun ĉiuj dialogo en Esperanto. Kiel vi povas paroli rezisti ke por kvin dolaroj?
(I have no idea what I just said. I let Google translate it for me.)
A little more seriously, any spelling reform to make spelling match pronunciation would slaughter grammar rules for plurals and past tense. Now you generally add -s for plural and -ed for past tense, but there are many pronunciations for each which would result in many different spellings so you would have kats and dogz for pets.
We have some gendered words, for example ships are referred to as “she” and “her”. But there are not many.
My guess is that they didn’t have a million different activities that kept them from practicing their reading skills. If the only exposure to reading is at school them they probably won’t be able to read well. Phonics should be mandatory in schools. Make reading and spelling much easier but that might take away from extra curricular activities.
It really is aggravating to see kids in 6th grade that can’t write a complete sentence with proper puncuation and hyphenation. Since when do you hyphenate one syllable words? Amazing how little they actually learn in English grammer!
Around here, all grades of ignorance are excused by “I’m just a dumb old country boy/girl”. We sometimes call it Appalachian Ebonics.
We had a similar experience in our small CT town school system.
School administrators, teachers and board members completely bought into the Outcome based education fad in the early mid-90’s.
Piped piper “facilitator” came to town offering up OBE whole language - creative / inventive spelling, and Mimosa math program.
Nine teachers voted in favor, without any reference checks to see if the $20,000 crap curriculum actually worked anywhere it was adopted.
Teachers were told to cease phonetic lessons, halt drill n kill math table memorization.
Multi-age classrooms were put into place to help kids and teachers better socialize / contain the teaching methodology.
$80,000 / yr curriculum director encouraged elimination of grades, in favor of a portfolio student assessment.
Teachers opposing the experiment were told to keep silent.
We augmented our kid’s education with Saxon homeschool traditional math and reading lessons at home.
Within one year of the school system adopting OBE, 4, 6, and 8th grade reading and math State academic standard competency test results plummeted to 60% passing.
School system then adopted “new” language arts program called “Reading Recovery” which incorporated some phonetics and spelling instruction.
The town school education experiment went so bad, science and social studies were cut 50% in order to accomodate all of the remedial core reading and math instruction.
Bottom line:
I had the education of a life time, witnessing firsthand what absolute irresponsible fools many “educators” are, and have poor critical thinking skills.
They suffer no consequence for their negiligence, injuring students and taxpayers alike, escaping nicely off in to fat retirement sunset.
“Our constitution is written in cursive. In another generation Americans will have to rely on someone to tell them what it says.”
This is exactly why the Muslims keep their masses illiterate, so only the imams can tell all the idiots what the Koran instructs them to do.
Once I saw how letters, sounds and words worked it was like Hellen Keller in The Miracle Worker. It was like a code had been cracked and I could understand everything. Sure we have issues with spellings and pronunciations that "break the rules", but we learn the exceptions and move on.
You are not supposed to ask why some students are having trouble learning to read. There is an elephant in the room and we are supposed to ignore it.
That reminds me... Aren’t we supposed to italicize foreign words when used in written English?
This is to accommodate all the new Americans.
Equally gramatically valid in English is to refer to a ship as “it.” I’ve never heard of any inanimate thing referred to in English as a “he” however. It would seem that “she” is preserved as an honorific.
“Chinese is really hard.”
Yes. But over a billion people know Chinese.
I have been both anxious AND eager to get started on some projects when I’m concerned about having enough time to finish something I want to work on and do a good job.
That is because they do not teach the Trivium.
If children are taught Latin, they will have the root word of nearly 65% of English and a strong understanding of grammar. They will be able to comprehend what constitutes a logical argument, unlike this author.
I thought of one. Some people used to call Teddy Kennedy "he".
Improved penmanship would help.
oh, brrrrrrrrrrt (raspberry)
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