Hooray for poor grammar.
Bekah and I have experienced frustration with our supposed college level communications class. At our school, communication is a fancy word for English, and the class seems as if it was intended for sixth graders (or as an English as a second language class).
This week is the last week of class, so one would think the material we are covering would be a higher difficulty level than previous weeks. Yet, last week we had an assignment on strategies to remember proper usage of commonly misused words like raze/raise or am/pm. Am/pm?! Who over the age of twelve does not know the difference between am and pm? We also had a quiz that asked us which word was the correct word... protectedest or most protected.
I feel like I am in a junior high remedial grammar class. But as time goes by, I see more and more why classes like this exist. Even the professionals need help. The following is copied word for word (I kid you not) from Yahoo sports. It is a description of Toronto Raptors' point guard T.J. Ford.
"Ford's scoring average has risen to 16.2 points per game, but he's still been inconsistent on the offensive end as he tries to get use to his knew surroundings. " (see it here)
Get use??? Knew???
Some one needs to go back to college.
Who'da thunk?
ReplyDeleteSeems to me that them there, pro fessional news dudes, coulda used more better gramer than "knew."
Even I know'd that one.
All puny business aside; the solution to our educational system resides in giving them a larger budget. If they just had more money to spend per student... Everything would be more gooder.
Nic,
ReplyDeleteYou both have my deepest sympathies. By the time students reach college, they should not be force-fed remedial grammar, spelling, punctuation, usage, and style. Unfortunately, you are a victim of lowest common denominator instruction; teach to the lowest level of the class.
I was fortunate to attend K-12 in Palouse, Washington. Our seventh grade teacher, Mrs. Beitzel (for whom no praise will ever be great enough) gave us our first style book. She was able to teach English at a high school level to us seventh graders because the teachers in grades one through five had laid the foundation for learning.
Have you asked your instructor why s/he's teaching dumbed-down English in a communications class?
I have asked why the basic level instructions...
ReplyDeleteMy teacher said that these skills may be a review for me, but it is new to some of the other students. She folled that with a comment about how much she looks forward to reading my work.
Trust me--many, many of my college students need remedial help with not only writing, but reading comprehension, argumentation, expression of ideas, having the ideas in the first place.....you get the picture.
ReplyDeleteIt's a combination of many things: the state of our schools, the very low cultural value placed on clear thinking and communicating, the general population's disdain for any intellectual endeavor, etc.
Even if we beef up our school systems, how can we fight the larger cultural issues? I don't know the answer to that.