Category: Education

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THIS Is Why America Is Currently in Decline

Well, it’s part (a large part) of the reason we’re in trouble. The following is a partial response to a tech site article, written by a professional “reporter” of tech news, if you can believe it. No, I won’t link it. The parts I don’t point out are as badly-written (or worse) and would only serve to improperly influence anyone not as thoroughly inoculated against linguistic drivel as I seem to be.

    • “At the time there were many different OS’s [sic] on the market…”

    Good Godfrey! Is there no editorial staff? No proofreading? No literate person to put an end to atrocities like this? An apostrophe IS NOT USED TO FORM A PLURAL!

    Apparently, there are no literate gatekeepers between writers and publishing; witness, earlier:

    “Common users also were quite skeptical to [sic] this new fancy gadget called a ‘Mouse’.”

    Not “to” but “about”. Learn the meanings of words!

    And,

    “IBM they [sic] named it PC-DOS and it quickly became a popular and widespread system.”

    WTF?!?

    And, “While back in their ‘lab’ secretly developing their new battleship, that would grow to conquer the world.”

    sic-sic-sic-sic-sic-sic-SICK!

    Sentence, please! Make a sentence! And what’s with the quotation marks around “lab”? And the comma between “battleship” and “that”? It’s just plain stupid, quite apart from being completely, totally and absolutely uncalled for.

    And the hits just keep on (and keep on) coming:

    “Windows 1.0: changing computers for ever…”

    No! No! No! Not “for ever” but “forever”–ONE WORD.

    How about,

    “Windows 1, [sic] was not the first of its kind but it introduced several improvements, among others were [sic] multi-tasking.”

    Dude! Lose the extraneous, meaningless, WRONGLY PLACED commas! They only serve to make you look stupid. And it just makes me sick to read the rest of the sentence. I gag just contemplating that abortion.

    The whole thing continues with one egregiously stupid comma, subject-verb disagreement and word mis-usage after another. *gag* And the guy actually does this for his day job.

    Thief.

    And unwitting subliterate products of “public education” (AKA “prisons for kids” and “remedial failure academies for young adults”) will read this dreck and have their subliterate ignorance reinforced. It’s evil, I say, just evil.

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    See Inigo Montoya

    A “professional tech writer” (yeh, she gets paid for this kind of thing) vomited this one:

    “Microsoft is continuing to eke out the Windows 8 news.”

    That usage is so far “off list” that one would need a fully functioning Hubble telescope to gain a view of its meaning from that sentence. Even in the closest proper use of the phrase “eke out,” that is “to make (a meager supply) last, esp by frugal use,” the sentence misses the mark. One “ekes out” a meager supply to avert complete lack. There’s certainly a wealth of news M$ could release, now, but they choose not to, thus “eking out” a meager supply–the closest one could come to making that sentence work–simply does not apply here.

    *sigh*

    Literacy is more than just being able to laboriously convert those strange squiggles on a page into words or string some of them together in some sort of nearly sensible order. Understanding the words, having a store of well-written texts one has read and understood, is the next step to literacy. Things like this in text written by someone who makes her living with the written word are both disappointing and disturbing.

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    An “F” for Test Design

    Lovely Daughter sent me the photo below (modified to obscure personal information of both student and teacher). If I had been grading the pictured test, the student would have been credited with 100% correct answers and the test designer with a big fat zero for amphibolous (equivocal) wording. Just sayin’.

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    For All Those Who Think We Need to “Save” Public Schools

    Fine. Save ’em. Go ahead. Here’s one thing that would help:

    Freedom. Freedom from the edicts of remote educrats, politicians and “edumacators” (who generally know bupkis about actually teaching anything worthwhile).

    Freedom to fail or excel exercised at the lowest possible level: first the parents, then the classroom, the school, the district. State and federal standards and requirements for the local school should be relegated to a strictly advisory role, with standardized tests used solely as a metric to allow the users of the schools to evaluate their own schools’ performance.

    Schools run according to the demands of the patrons (the parents, the community that pays the bills, etc.) would either suck, excel or fall somewhere in between. The parents of schools that suck would KNOW they suck because, well, that’s what the parents wanted. If they want their kids to continue to be abused with poor education, then they can choose to do so. If they want to better their children’s education, then they’ll have the examples of schools that are better to study and emulate, if they wish.

    Oh, and Freedom to Choose. Don’t like the poor quality of schooling afforded by the tastes and desires of the parents at “your” schools? You should be free to take your children to the school of your choice. (And that school should be free to bill the district or school your taxes support.)

    Sure, this wouldn’t solve all the problems, but just this one small *heh* thing would place both the responsibility and authority in the hands of those to whom it properly belongs: the parents of the children in the schools (and the surrounding community, which both has needs for useful workers and a right to control how their tax dollars are spent).

    I can already hear objections from some, “But what about poor communities? Won’t they need resources (tax dollars) from elsewhere in order to afford decent schools?”

    No, they won’t. Parents–often single income parents making below average incomes–have been able to offer superior education at home on a shoe string. I know we did for a while. (Yes, my single income at the time wasn’t very much below the national average for a family of four, but it was below that mark, in an average-expense locale. *shrugs* We made it, despite “gummint” harassment and paying for other folks’ kids education as well. *heh*) There have been absolutely NO (that’s a big zero with the rim kicked off) credible studies linking higher education costs with effectiveness. In fact, I suspect that removing remote edicts, and the additional costs they require with only partial funding from the bureaucrappy that issued the edict, would significantly improve the cost issue for most schools, while allowing dramatically improved instruction.

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    Just ONE of the Things Wrong With “Public Education” (Sadly, Often Better Known as “Prisons for Kids”)

    Teachers are often required to attend “workshops” and “seminars” run by “education professionals” to maintain so-called “continuing education” credits necessary for their certifications/licenses. All too typically, such events feature know-nothing (or worse, know wrongly) educrats telling the teachers what they MUST do in their classrooms in order to be in compliance with some governmental regulation. Example: a workshop not long back featuring a remote educrat who said, “I have never taught in the classroom, but here is how you do xxxx.”

    A know-nothing dictating to those who already know how to teach… but who often simply aren’t allowed to do so.

    Remote educrats and the admins who enforce their edicts: F-n’ idiots.

    One of the better things about rural schools is that some are often in quiet rebellion against city folks running their lives, and they’re small enough and sometimes remote enough to get away with a wee bit of foot-dragging on some of the stupider edicts. Just one reason that rural schools in general outperform many urban school systems in useful education. Review the principles of subsidiarity and accountability for reasons why this may work better in rural settings…

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    Oh, Great… for Kids Who Can Get Their Parents to Move East for the Summer

    TD Bank is offering kids (18 or younger) $10 for reading 10 books this summer.

    Great, right? Here’s the deal:

    1. Read 10 books this summer. See suggestions.
    2. Print out the Summer Reading Form
    3. Write down the names of the books they’ve read
    4. Take the form to the nearest TD Bank
    5. Watch $10 be deposited into a new or existing Young Saver Account

    Oh, wait. Notsogreat.

    1. Locate the nearest TD Bank location (WTF?!? I thought TD Bank specialized in online banking!):

    “There is no listing found based on your criteria. Please change your criteria and try again.” (IOW, “Move to a location where we have a physical presence, sucker!”)

    2. Move there.
    3. “Here’s your money kid, only… we’ll keep it for you. Howzat for a sweet deal, eh?”
    4. 10 books? *feh* Sub-par. Way, way sub-par. (Of course, “par” to me is the last Summer Reading Program I participated in as a kid. My total? 235 books for the summer. Yeh, yeh, Mom did shoo me outa the house, and visits to grandparents involved lotsa outdoorsy stuff, too. IOW, wasn’t 24X7 w/my nose in a book. I used to read a lot more than I do even now.)

    Of course, if parents would simply stop playing “event planners” for their kids entertainment schedules and just, well, parent while letting doing whatever they can to compel their mentally lazy kids to create their own entertainment, then encouraging them to read, making sure they can get to a library, etc., could go a long way toward improving our future citizens.

    Just sayin’.

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    “Just too much to bare”

    *sigh*

    Apart from all the books I read (back up to a little less than half the number per week of my peak of a 23/week average of some years ago), I read, well, just about everything I can get my hands on, physical or virtual. While I don’t read as many blog posts every day as I once did, I read a lot of those too. More and more it seem the trend in all sorts of blogs is toward less and less literate expression. Two small examples from a blog at a site for health professionals:

    ” …the humor of the ______ was too much to bare.”

    “By this point all of the racket had also waken up ______________.”

    No, Mr. 20-Something IT Pro for a health institution: “too much to bear”. And “waken up” isn’t correct here either. “Had… awakened” or “had… woken” or even the poorer “had… wakened up”.

    It’s as though more and more people have never read anything written by a literate person, and more and more people have never heard a literate person speak English. Well, of course. Most are products of public schools. Perhaps as many as 1/3 (perhaps) of students ENTERING high school are proficient readers of English, according to Scholastic.com (pdf here). Perhaps. Of those who go on to graduate college (self-selected to–maybe–be more literate, whatever that means, than their peers), almost 31% are literate enough to read their way out of a paper bag, actually a decline in reading proficiency from their entry into high school.

    Is it any wonder that our (once, formerly) representative republic with all too many democratic elements is in trouble? Do the right thing: read more. Read material that’s written well and researched well and presented as honestly as possible. As much as possible, encourage others to do the same.

    Your grandchildren will thank you.

    *sigh* The first blog post I read today (on a political “analysis” site) offered more evidence of the trend noted above (I swear it I read this kind of crap a.] so you don’t have to *heh* and b.] ALL the time–unfortunately–while trying to gain info that fleshes out background the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind obscures or otherwise lies about… not that the Hivemind is any better at literate expression).

    “phenomena’s”

    No, a.) the plural of “phenomenon” is “phenomena” and b.) trying to form a plural by using an apostrophe is nothing short of stupid.

    “over looked”

    It’s one word, not two.

    ly’s (“The problem ly’s…”)

    *ack-thbbt!-spew* LIES, dumbass! Dual stupidities here. “Ly’s” isn’t even a word and the use of the apostrophe is so monumentally stupid as to be almost a landmark stupidity. This guy’s parents and teachers should be shot, and he should be dragged over hot coals on the way to being tarred, feathered and burned at the stake. Hopefully before he reproduces.

    “the support is cult like”

    The preferred formation is “cult-like”.

    “ITS not an anti gay amendment…. its pro morality amendment”

    Of course, NOW when apostrophes are REQUIRED the dumbass subliterate moron doesn’t use them! Of course.

    But this sort of thing is rampant, and not just in “citizen journalism” so-called.

    “Something Barack Hussein Obama seems to know nothing about.”

    Want more? Surely not! Well, one simply cannot go to ANY Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind outlet and not receive an assault on literacy. Consider a current (May 11, 2012) headline:

    “First Male Masseuse Who Sued Travolta Admits He Has WRONG DATE…”

    WTF?!? A masseuse is a woman who gives massage. A male who does so is a masseur. How these people who write such things can live with themselves I don’t know.

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    I Knew That!

    And what I knew was… wrong. For values of “wrong” that include the outdated. You see, when I was in grade school, I really, really did not pay attention most of the time. First grade taught me that school was a bit stupid. “Who are Dick and Jane that I should care one whit about their inane activities?” was the basic reaction my six-year-old mind had to the silly idea that I should be taught to read, for example. I was a naturally ego-centric six-year-old, and so I really could not understand why people were trying to “teach” (for values of “teaching” that included crippling my reading with “look-say” crap) me how to do something I already did, less well. That tended to color my response to school right off the bat.

    But there were subjects that caught my young mind, even though the methods of presentation were boring or off-putting. Geography is one example. Maps had fascinated me from my earliest recollections of them. Boundaries, places, geographical features: all gripped my imagination. So, when in third grade the subject of the countries of the Americas–North and South–and the States of the Union were presented in class, I ate that stuff up with a spoon.

    But I never noticed until just recently that in 1960 Brazil had changed its capital. That’s 52 years of “seeing” (in my mind’s eye) the capital of Brazil as being in the wrong place, with the wrong name.

    But that’s OK. I don’t plan on traveling there anyway. *heh* That’s kind of how I view African nations anymore, too. I DGARA anymore what someone’s calling some crappy lil third world country this week or what the latest warlord has declared to be the capital.

    Oh, wait:back on topic? OK. The map is not the territory, even with the best maps colored by the most fecund imaginations. And the best maps are incomplete, outdated. Even the county assessor’s aerial survey map of my own house is inaccurate and outdated (two slightly different things: the property line is an approximation and there’ve been notable changes in exterior structure, etc. since the photos were taken).

    All models of reality are just that: models, approximations based on a data set which is necessarily less than the reality they represent. What we know from models is even less than the models themselves, because the models are always based on more information than they represent and our grasp of even the models themselves may well be incomplete as well. And reality is a moving target while models, or maps, of reality are at best snapshots.

    And that’s part of the problem–not all by any means, but part–with the Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Scare-ism models and true believers’ dogmatic acceptance of the Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Scare-ism’s high priests’ pronouncements from those models. All the models the cult bases its beliefs on are extremely simplistic representations of a few climate factors from a huge, highly complex system, so the models themselves, as has been demonstrated over and over again, are deeply flawed (none of the Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Scare-ism’s models predicting doom and gloom have yet been able to “post-dict” previous era’s climate, for example. If they cannot “post-dict” what temperatures, for example, were in 1900, then they’re essentially useless in predicting future temps).

    Just remember whenever someone says “the science is settled” in any area–not just the area claimed by the Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Scare-ism–maps change, and maps are far less complex and open to change than our understanding of the simplest things in scientific endeavors. Read Aristotle. Genius. Wrong. Read Newton. Genius. Wrong. Read Galileo. Genius. Wrong.

    Read Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Scare-ism’s high priests. Dumb. And Dumber. And “wronger” than any of the geniuses who preceded them and whose graves they piss upon with their insistence that their poor models–rain-faded sidewalk chalk sketches of a child’s crayon drawing of a painting of a photo of a shadow of a statue of a man would be a more accurate representation of a man than Warmistas’ models are of climate change–have “settled” the science.

    Remember: just because the capital of Brazil was Rio de Janeiro (under two different names) for about 400 years doesn’t mean it still is.

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    “A Day Late…

    Forty-six years ago, I purchased a set of books, the Great Books of the Western World as compiled by Mortimer J. Adler, et al. The 54-volume set was a tad expensive for a high school kid (twice what I paid for my first car, in fact; nowadays, USED copies of the set run from ~$350 to ~$1,200 on Amazon), but has been a great resource for decades. Sadly, the bindings are in rough shape (largely the result of toddlers getting their hands on ’em a couple of decades and more back, as well as simple wear from use), and some volumes are in downright raggedy shape.

    Fast forward to today. I picked up 40 of the 54 volumes in excellent condition at a library books sale of donated books. Most appear completely unread, untouched, although volume 1 of the complete works of Shakespeare is well worn (though still not as worn as my original copy). Glad to have ’em. Oh, why only 40 of the 54? Well, volume 2, the first of two volumes comprising the “Syntopicon” was missing from the donated collection, and 13 other volumes had been purchased by one person before I purchased the rest.

    I’ll probably print up some book covers for the “raggedy” copies in my original set and place them in among the “new” set for use, as I still use them for reference, although I have re-read few of them entirely in the last couple of decades. I may also add volumes from the 1990 “second edition” of the collection, at least some works that I don’t already own in other editions as separate copies–who doesn’t already own at least one copy of Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” for example, or “Waiting for Godot” [Beckett], Animal Farm [Orwell], etc.? I think I may skip volumes 59 and 60 (heavy on 20th Century) from the new edition. I despise Joyce, detest Faulkner and Ftzgerald, and Virginia Woolf gives me a rash. The ones in the collection that are worth anything, IMO, I already have, usually in multiple copies (Brecht, Beckett, Chekhov, Eliot, Shaw and others), anyway.

    The recent “classes” via Hillsdale College dealing with the Constitution (thanks for the tip, Diane) have already gotten me re-reading background the Founders drew on in the discussions that formed our national government, so this is a timely find for me.

    So, I worked a little bit tonight on some bookshelves. *heh* I may actually get our books organized more sensibly this year. Hey! It could happen! At least I have plenty to read and plenty to re-read (and plenty that’s worth re-reading) handy.

    BTW, from that great *cough* reference work, Wikipedia (which nevertheless does have a few good articles), this:

    “The scientific and mathematical selections also came under criticism for being incomprehensible to the average reader… “

    Well, boo-hoo. Literacy is more than just puzzling out weird hieroglyphs on a page. Other criticisms of the collection are on a par with that one. *yawn* Yes, it’s incomplete, but hey, “Great” used to mean something more than simply “good” or “trendy” or “makes feminazis and multi-cultis feel good”.

    Addendum 2: It’s interesting, to me at least, that this work was compiled and the “Great Conversation of Ideas” (largely via the tool of the Syntopicon–a monumental work in and of itself, IMO) fostered as a project sponsored by the University of Chicago, and yet The Zero, that soi-disant “constitutional scholar” who (mis)taught as an adjunct prof at that institution, seems completely unaware of the works (and ideas) contained in this collection except in a sort of weird, twisted mythological manner, since he never seems to get references to Western Civ (history OR concepts) anywhere near right.