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Posted on 08/04/2013 11:13:50 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Professor says kids no longer need to learn spelling and grammar because of smartphones
The Daily Caller 4 hours ago Education
Several skills that every kid once learned in school are going the way of the dodo in a hurry. Diagramming sentences is practically an extinct art, for example. Cursive handwriting and memorized multiplication tables look to be swiftly headed that way.
Apparently, the next thing that kids will no longer need to learn is spelling and grammar.
Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in northeast England, announced that traditional language rules are out of fashion, reports the Daily Mail. Kids don’t need to waste time on those things, see. State-of-the-art computers and mobile phones can make the necessary corrections.
Spelling and grammar are “a bit unnecessary because they are skills that were very essential maybe 100 years ago but they are not right now,” Mitra said. “Firstly, my phone corrects my spelling so I don’t really need to think about it and, secondly, because I often skip grammar and write in a cryptic way.”
The professor made the anti-spelling proclamation at a time when the British government is rolling out a host of educational standards including one that will require students to take a spelling test involving 200 complex words near the end of grade school.
Another exam for 11-year-olds that tests spelling, grammar and punctuation was launched this year.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Oh, well then.....what a great way to communicate your ideas: Cryptically!
Well, after being lectured by MSNBCNN about what an intellectual Rachel Jeantel was, perhaps he has a point.
Oh come on, Sub-Driver, why should kids bother their busy little heads with spelling and grammar when they have such interesting video games and ‘n stuff?
And gangs to play with. And stores to rob. And citizens to murder.
Have a heart, fellah.
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hunka hunka burning crap
omg that made me smile a big smile. so many years ago....
this is hugh and series
There is just no way to make the seventies not look stupid is there?
“I recall hearing the same sort of nonsense many years ago, when some education professors declared that due to the pervasiveness of calculators, children no longer needed to learn basic math.”
Every now and then, I get out the old bamboo slide rule and give it a spin just to see if I still remember how it works.
They need to know spelling just enough to vote Democrat (with a little help from a friendly “poll watcher).”
He also set the original in London. What can you say? Movie writers take creative license.
Noam Chomsky’s brilliant Whole Language English instruction single-handedly reduced the literacy skills of black children from almost on a par with white children, to illiterate, in a little more than a single decade, insuring failure in school and perpetual impoverishment for millions of black people.
Thus Noam Chomsky has done more than any other person, alive or dead, to “Keep the black man down”. So much for his “bright idea”.
But this being said, pronouncements about what children need and what they do not need from such academics has lost so much credibility, that it will take 500 or more years before *anything*, *any* of them say should even be considered as possible.
if they do this their is going to be troubul
Using autocorrect is stupid. Better to just learn to do it right!
There’s no autocorrect for stupidity. If there were, every time I type in imposter, it would correct it to 0bama.
They are learning the environmental 3 r’s, reuse, recycle and reduce. Guess they are training them all to be trash men.
On the subject of learning multiplication tables, long division; etc., the Ct. school system around the U. Conn. area announced its decision to stop teaching the multiplication tables and long division. My sister, herself a teacher, was next to an old German engineer during the decision. The brilliant engineer shook his head sadly, turned to my sister and told her the school board was making a serious mistake. As a old, wise engineer, he should know what he is talking about.
From a physiological perspective,what the process of education requires of the student through his exercises is and actual imprinting of his brain. Yet, under the influence of the philosophy of Romanticism, contemporary education is fundamentally opposed to these essentials of education.It draws a distinction between "problem solving," which it views as "creative," and claims to favor, and "memorization," which it appears to regard as an imposition on the students, who's valuable, executive time, it claims,can be better spent in "problem solving."
Contemporary education is responsible for the growing prevalence of irrational skepticism. The students subjected to it do not acquire actual knowledge, The have no firm foundation in a base of memorized facts, and they have not acquired any solid knowledge of principles, because their education has, as far as possible, avoided the painstaking processes of logical proof and repeated application of principles, which latter constitutes a vital and totally legitimate form of memorization.
Their failure to memorize such things as the multiplication tables in their childhood makes it impossible for them to understand whatever directly depends on such knowledge, which in turn makes it impossible for them to acquire the further knowledge that depends on that knowledge, and so on. With each passing year of their education, they fall further behind.
Last year I cudn’t spel collige student now I are one...
If Einstein then asked them to be quiet so that he could teach, 10 of them would collaborate to write a statement that he said something sexual or threatened them, and then Einstein would be removed and put into the Absent Teacher Reserve or worse. Whatever the kids say is "substantiated" and the teacher is not believed at all. The teacher's authority is undermined, heck, blown to complete hell. The teacher is the prey of the students, who don't want to do any work and yet want a passing grade.
But all you can complain about is teachers unions. Walk a mile in the moccasins of a NYC high school teacher, then get back to me. If you live long enough. I've seen 2 colleagues carried out on stretchers and numerous others assaulted and injured.
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