Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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Made Me Laugh. Stop It.

“‘I’ll Clean Trump’s Clock’ – Author Brad Thor Announces He Will Challenge Trump in 2020”

Urm, not if he politics as poorly as he writes. (His writing’s about on a par with Dan #gagamaggot Brown, IMO. OK, maybe a little better. Currently, there is no worse “bestselling” writer than Dan Brown. I found Thor’s stuff merely pedestrian and boringly predictable. Tastes vary, though.)

Thor’s stuff is good enough for made-for-Lifetime “C” movies, though. That’s better than Dan Brown’s stuff which is just stupid.

On second thought. . . There were plenty of stupid people around to vote for both The Trumpery and The Queenie Cacklepants Cylon in 2016, and it takes a certain kind of stupidity to find Thor’s books at all readable, so. . .

*sigh*

Someone, please save us from the ambitions of mediocre writers and conmen and corrupt pols. #gagamaggot

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Yeh, Sorta, but Not

The Myth of ‘Learning Styles’

Are “learning styles” theories all they are cracked up to be? No. But are they myths? Absolutely not. Despite the fact that folks almost certainly do not have ONE “style” of learning that is hardwired into them, folks do seem to have preferred modes of learning, often different for different endeavors. The most basic classes of “learning styles” (actually, in this case, “modalities”) most often pout forth are kinesthetic, auditory, and visual, with many different variations and combinations and terminologies offered as theoretical possibilities using the basic “modalities”.

A preference or preferences, however, don’t mandate that a person cannot effectively learn in different ways. This is where the writer of the article and I part ways. Labeling learning styles a “myth” isjust silly. She even hints at the fact of the non-mythical nature of learning styles with the elliptical “admission against interest,”

“. . .a lot of evidence suggests that people aren’t really one certain kind of learner or another. . . ”

(implying, of course, that there are different ways of learning, just that, as anyone who’s ever taught OR LEARNED anything knows, different tasks may call for different ways of learning something).

Some things I learn best and most quickly by simply reading (and actually studying) text. Others, I learn best by simply observing elements closely and then getting hands on. Others seem to almost require visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modalities together to master (yeh, I can hear a piece of music and reproduce it, either in manuscript or via an instrument of my choice, but seeing a piece of sheet music, hearing it “in my head” in preview, then performing it–thus rehearsing–what I previously heard “in my head”), cementing them for me. *shrugs* Other things don’t seem to require all that much involvement for me.

But actual learning that lasts always takes one thing: doing what I have “learned,” putting it into practice, using it, reifying it, if you will.

I think that may be universal.

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Is Literacy Moribund in These [Dis]United States?

I see it all the time, but again today some “misunderedumacated” subliterate stuck on the lefthand side of the Dunning-Kruger Curve pontificated on a subject he was–of course–completely unqualified (because of his ignorance) to comment on, and while doing so misused “wreckless,” because (again, of course) he did not know the differences between “reckless” and “wreckless.” Such subliterate (or really, by any reasonable standard, illiterate) people almost always misuse all or some of the following words (and more, many, many more):

rein/reign
affect/effect
than/then
here/hear
buy/by
accept/except
weather/whether
there/their/they’re
to/too/two
you’re/your
bear/bare
one/won
brake/break
complement/compliment
aloud/allowed
lie/lay
it’s/its
capital/capitol
principle/principal
stationary/stationery
sight/site/cite
since/sense
our/hour
red/read
reed/read

. . . and many, many (MANY) more such. *sigh*

Now, someone might plead, “Oh, but that’s just a problem in vocabulary.” No. If someone does not know the meanings of the words they read or write, then they are really no better off than someone who cannot decode those funny lil squiggles to obtain the words they indicate. Worse off, in fact, because they may well erroneously think they are literate (because by the standards of “misunderedumacationism” they have been lied to, having been told they are–why! they have a piece or pieces of paper to prove it! #gagamaggot).

Fluency =/= literacy. A person may have a wide verbal vocabulary of words they understand and still be illiterate.

How to amend this? Reading a lot of well-written text authored by literate people can eradicate this sort of illiteracy. It’s either that or do what I did as a lad (along with reading a LOT of well-written text): read dictionaries–and not just one! And not just any dictionary, either. I have a shelf full of dictionaries, and I have found the ones published before the 1970s to be the more literate of the selections I have. *shrugs* Make of that what you will. Oh, and not just in English (for English readers, which I assume are the only readers of this blog). Having dictionaries on other language, including English-German, English-French, etc., can be useful in understanding WHY such homonyms as “reckless/wreckless” are very, very different words.

But still, reading well-written text from literate writers (while having a good dictionary by one’s side 😉 ) is the single best way to become literate, once one has mastered the relatively simple task of decoding those funny lil squiggles that stand in for phonemes in written text.

Sidebar: only peripherally related to literate vocabulary. Saw a website the other day by someone who cited their creds as “EDd”. Sorry, cupcake. If you have a doctorate in education, you ought to know that is denoted by EdD or Ed.D. But maybe the cred referred to is a doctorate in “[misunder]edumacationism.”

P.S. Yes, I am well aware that the dumbed down definition of “literacy” is well accepted. Of course it is. “Edumacationists” can’t defend their failure to promote real literacy, so the only definition such will accept is “can decode those funny lil squiggles, whether they can really understand the content or not.”

#gagamaggot

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Uncrunching Time

I have a bit more time in my day now that I have pared my internet comic reading down to ten, urm, eleven, OK, twelve regular reads…

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Rights: Whence Come They?

Sidebar: I avoid terms like “gun rights,” because the real issue is the inherent right of every individual to defend one’s own life and limb against an aggressor (individual or group) doing or threatening to do harm, and to defend his loved ones and the otherwise defenseless innocent from the same. Guns are just one of many tools (excellent and effective tools, indeed often the best of tools, but one of many) for effecting legitimate self-defense.

I also do not like the terms “constitutional rights” or “2nd Amendment right” for similar reasons, but expanding to include the fact that those rights which arementioned in the constitution are mentioned only to prevent infringement of those rights by the federal government.

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Contemporary Illiteracy, Illustrated

While examples of illiteracy abound in Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind “reporting,” books–whether published by traditional publishing venues or self-pub writers–and social media (a rich, rich field to mine for examples), almost nothing beats so-called “memes”1 for a steady supply of illiterate text. Example:

The “meme” featured above was apparently composed by a “misunderedumacated” product of “public education” (A.K.A. “prisons for kids”). The abbreviation for “second” is “2nd,” not “2ed.” Oh, and standard English orthography does NOT have a space between the last word in a sentence and the punctuation closing the sentence, and a question should be punctuated with a question mark, not an exclamation mark. Those practices are reserved for those who never became literate.

But I am sure the reader can supply many, many such examples of folks proudly displaying their illiteracy in “memes” they hope will spread (and infect others with their illiterate text).

1meme: “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture,” or at least that was the meaning when Richard Dawkins coined the word. Since, stupid people have misused it enough that a secondary meaning has become accepted by many as the only meaning they are (illiterately) aware of: “amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media,” and further devolved to mean some graphic/text combo that some illiterate boob hopes will spread. . . #gagamaggot

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For the Children

The ONLY good thing about the Waco massacre (and it’s a thin reed indeed *sigh*) was the blue-on-blue ATF deaths. When the bad guys kill each other, it’s always good. Too bad there were so few. It in no way mitigates the horrendous evil perpetrated by the feds, but at least it’s a small (very small) thing. *sigh*