Well- she was number 1 in her class, so it’s obvious that everyone else that graduated Princeton that year must be even dumber than her. 

Let’s go on a witch hunt and fire every single person out there with a 1976 Princeton degree.  It’s only logical.

Sotomayor’s strategy was to consume books on grammar and language, for one thing, and Buchanan finds this beneath college students

I wish more college students would do this, even the ones that are already “literate” in English.

Exactly how does anybody know if Sotomayor’s first language wasn’t English?  She was born an American Citizen to American Citizens, and lived her entire life in the continental US.

“Huckleberry Finn” or “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” or “Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland”

Um, what? Those are books are only for children now? Pat should tell that to my Evangelical Uni where I studied those books and many others as part of getting my English [Literature] degree<i>. Asshole. Seriously. There are goddamned dissertations written on Alice.

On a side note: Pat Buchanan is <i>still alive? Really? I guess the opposite to “the good die young” really is true.

I might also point out that grammar and language can be very critical if you are dealing with regulations, scientific reports that will be made into regulations,  .... AND LEGAL MATTERS!  Fine points of wording have very contentious meanings when one is ... A JUDGE!

I thought the preferred method of responding to his screeds would be to gesture at him like a game show host and derisively say “Pat Buchanan, everyone! Let’s give it up!” followed by a slow, sarcastic golf clap.

Fine points of wording have very contentious meanings when one is ... A JUDGE!

Heh. Rendering Alice all the more relevant to legal scholars:

`Then you should say what you mean,’ the March Hare went on.

`I do,’ Alice hastily replied; `at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.’

`Not the same thing a bit!’ said the Hatter. `You might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!’

`You might just as well say,’ added the March Hare, `that “I like what I get” is the same thing as “I get what I like”!’

`You might just as well say,’ added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, `that “I breathe when I sleep” is the same thing as “I sleep when I breathe”!’ - Alice in Wonderland

`I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’

`But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.

`When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’

`The question is,’ said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

`The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master—that’s all.’

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. `They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs: they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’ - Alice Through the Looking Glass

Huckleberry Finn IS NOT AND NEVER HAS BEEN A CHILDREN’S BOOK GODDAMMIT!!! Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

Exactly how does anybody know if Sotomayor’s first language wasn’t English?

It doesn’t matter.  His entire message boils down to “She stomped on my dog whistle!”

Pat Buchanan 150 years ago: “those damned Irish immigrants, coming to our shores—they’ll no sooner lose their Papism than their accents…”

Oh, wait…

And in pushing the smear, Buchanan tacitly suggests that the functionally illiterate morons are the people on his side.

Well, a good demagogue knows his audience. Know-Nothings revel in their lack of “book learnin’ ” (the Bible, of course, excepted—talk about people stuck on fairy tales).

<u>The Velveteen Rabbit</u> is one of my favorite books, and he can go fuck himself with a spiky stick, because I’m probably half again as smart as he is - at least, by the way those things are measured.

I don’t even speak a second language.  I don’t view immigrants around me who are just grasping English as stupid; I view them as people who speak at least one more fucking language than I do.  Man, the stupid.

As this blog points out so often, one of the biggest threats to freedom and democracy in America is this culture of anti-intellectualism.  I talk to people on fire-breathing conservative blogs sometimes and come away appalled at the inability of so many people to reason, to read basic English, to understand analogies, or to understand distinctions.  I am not saying everyone needs to have an Ivy League education but everyone should have some ability to engage in linear thinking, to imagine things from another point of view, and to at least understand an opposing argument.  Some of these people seem too stupid to breathe.

Of course, Anne Coulter and Pat Buchanan know better.  But they know they can make their base buy anything.  That’s scary.

The first few days of my freshman year at a college that consistently is in the top five in the US News and World Report rankings we all had to take a series of tests to place us in various courses.  One of them was a grammar exam.  Many, many, many of my fellow classmates bombed that exam.  And they were native speakers.

Someone upthread asks how anyone knows that English wasn’t Sotomayor’s first language.  Terkel quotes from the NYT article saying that Sotomayor was catching up on children’s literature she had missed growing up in a Spanish speaking home.  (Doesn’t mean English wasn’t her first language, just that she missed some aspects of being a native English speaker because Spanish was the preferred language in her home.)

My bf were just talking about this guy last night.  He’s a stonecold racist and always has been.  But we both thought that his time might be just about up.  He’s gone sideways on this, and MSNBC has given him an open mic.  It was always a matter of time until, in today’s internet information world, this guy was finally exposed for the unadultrated piece of shit that he is, and if this is that moment, he’s going to be off air soon.  He was always smarter than the other slimeballs, and that’s why he’s lasted.  And he always smiled and chuckled when he spoke his hate.  That’s why they call him Uncle Pat over at MSNBC, even Rachel does it.

But he’s that funny uncle you don’t want to leave alone with your kids.

Terkel quotes from the NYT article saying that Sotomayor was catching up on children’s literature she had missed growing up in a Spanish speaking home.  (Doesn’t mean English wasn’t her first language, just that she missed some aspects of being a native English speaker because Spanish was the preferred language in her home.)

Yes, this makes a lot more sense. The idea that the valedictorian of Cardinal Spellman HS was struggling with her English seems ludicrous.

Well, Steve, you know how they are with their affirmative-action valedictorians and all.

Yes, this makes a lot more sense. The idea that the valedictorian of Cardinal Spellman HS was struggling with her English seems ludicrous.

My parents both spoke English at home, though my father was born in a foreign country and my mom grew up in a non-english speaking home (actually, half and half). The “children’s book” thing has nothing to do with not speaking English at home, it has to do with the fact that immigrant families don’t typically read the same corpus of books to their children that American-born families do.

Sure, my parents read to me, but since there was no tradition in the family of reading things like The Wind in the Willows or Winnie the Pooh, we didn’t have any exposure to them. It wasn’t until high school, I think, that I realized that these were all the sorts of books that parents had read to their children growing up. Why? Because their grandparents probably read them to their parents.

The point is that this has nothing to do with Sotomayor’s proficience in English and more to do with catching up with things she wasn’t exposed to as a child.

The point is that this has nothing to do with Sotomayor’s proficience in English and more to do with catching up with things she wasn’t exposed to as a child.

Which, really, means that she wasn’t just learning the language, she was assimilating the culture. She’s an American success story, according to the wingnuts.

I’m just waiting for Volksgenosse Buchanan to call her a spic when he thinks his mike is off. He’s already done everything but.

Ahhhh…. there’s the Patrick J. Buchanan we all know and love.

Or something.

Buchanan is a somewhat enigmatic figure to me.  He came to my house a few times when I was very young, and he was my father’s colleague on the Editorial section at the now-defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat.  On a personal level, he’s a very charming and gregarious individual, even with his adversaries… hell, Rachel Maddow, who is his ideological opposite, occasionally refers to him somewhat affectionately as her “Fake Uncle Pat”.

But at his core, the man is a freaking antisemitic, nativist, protectionist, racist, wingnutty, paranoid Bircher.

He is a “kinder, gentler” version of Tom Tancredo.  Or hell, even David Duke.

He gained some praise for his criticism of the invasion of Iraq, but it wasn’t rooted in any sort of belief that the war was immoral.  The man wrote a book about why it was wrong for Roosevelt to engage in WWII following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The fact is, he’s living in some 19th Century mythical version of America in his mind, where all would be good if we had just kept brown people from crossing the border, if women had stayed in the kitchen, if gays had stayed in the closet, if black people hadn’t become so darn uppity, and if the rest of the world would just piss off.

Softer image or not, at his core, the man is a paranoid prick who buys into his own delusion that American white, Christian males are now the most oppressed class in the world.

And he is now the embodiment of the GOP in 2009 alongside Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and Dick Cheney - angry, bitter, old, white Christian men with entitlement issues who can’t stand seeing people who don’t look like them making any progress in our national power structure.

This is the last vestiges of Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” that once claimed so much power freaking out because they are becoming aware that they are in - to borrow the Dick’s words - “the last throes” of their insurgency.

Fuck ‘em.

The Know-Nothings are exactly the group the Republicans need to cultivate as their base. This has got to be the motive for a bunch of affluent, well-educated conservatives to engage in trash-talk about the “elitism” of the Ivy League, the New Yorker, white wine and arugula, etc. Here’s the plan:

1. Belittle education.
2. Shore up the self-esteem of those who don’t care about education.
3. Keep those people uneducated, by gum.
4. Fill their vacant heads with demagoguery, lies, and propaganda.
5. Instruct them to vote for Republicans.
6. Enjoy electoral power.

It’s worked surprisingly well in recent decades, though the bloom is off that rose after the ‘08 presidential election.

Orange, it seems, though, that an awful lot of people looked at that base that they were sitting with in the ‘08 election, and said to themselves, “Fuck, these people are stupid,” or crazy, or somesuch, and I don’t think that’s going to work so well anymore, because it’s one thing to decry rampant intellectualism, and it’s another to openly be proud of being stupid, which is the point they pushed.  So, really, I don’t know if the Know-Nothings are going to do a lot of good anymore, since no one wants to be known as a moron.

I honestly enjoy rereading “Ten apples up on top” about as often as I reread any other book (and I’ve never made it to “Ulysses” but I’ve read “Dubliners” 3 times, once for pleasure).

The Know-Nothings are exactly the group the Republicans need to cultivate as their base. This has got to be the motive for a bunch of affluent, well-educated conservatives to engage in trash-talk about the “elitism” of the Ivy League, the New Yorker, white wine and arugula, etc. Here’s the plan:

1. Belittle education.
2. Shore up the self-esteem of those who don’t care about education.
3. Keep those people uneducated, by gum.
4. Fill their vacant heads with demagoguery, lies, and propaganda.
5. Instruct them to vote for Republicans.
6. Enjoy electoral power.

It’s worked surprisingly well in recent decades, though the bloom is off that rose after the ‘08 presidential election.

Think of America as a gigantic male bladder.

And think of Republican electoral power in America as the urine in that bladder.

In 2006, America had to urinate, and so all of that urine was evacuated through the penis of America, Florida… it all pooled towards the Southeast corner of the country.  And then more was evacuated in 2008.

Granted, I shouldn’t give Florida too much grief as it went blue this past year, but the analogy roughly fits.  The geographic center of Republican power keeps shrinking and shrinking, but it still holds firm in most of Dixie - the only place they’ve got left.

It’s true that when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, the cost the Democratic Party the South for decades.  The Democrats still haven’t really gained much back in the South overall.

But in fully embracing that Southern evangelical wingnut Know-nothing base over the past decade, the Republicans have now completely forfeited all of New England, much of the Mid-Atlantic, much of the upper Midwest, the entire West Coast, and now they’re even starting to lose the Mountain West.

Scadenfreude rules.

Here’s what a couple of writers said about it:

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

                                              The Green Hills of Africa
 
                                            Ernest Hemingway

“I believe that ‘Huckleberry Finn’ is one of the great masterpieces of the world, that it is the full equal of ‘Don Quixote’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ that it is vastly better than Gil Blas, ‘Tristram Shandy,’ ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ or ‘Tom Jones.’ I believe that it will be read by human beings of all ages, not as a solemn duty but for the honest love of it, and over and over again, long after every book written in American between the years 1800 and 1860, with perhaps three exceptions, has disappeared entirely save as a classroom fossil. I believe that Mark Twain had a clearer vision of life, that he came nearer to its elementals and was less deceived by its false appearances, than any other American who has ever presumed to manufacture generalizations, not excepting Emerson. I believe that, admitting all his defects, he wrote better English, in the sense of cleaner, straighter, vivider, saner English, than either Irving or Hawthorne. I believe that four of his books—‘Huck,’ ‘Life on the Mississippi,’ ‘Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,’ and ‘A Connecticut Yankee’—are alone worth more, as works of art and as criticisms of life, than the whole output of Cooper, Irving, Holmes, Mitchell, Stedman, Whittier and Bryant. I believe that he was the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist of the royal blood.”
                         
Review of Albert Bigelow Paine’s biography of Mark Twain, in “The Smart Set” (February 1913)

  H. L. Mencken

So, really, I don’t know if the Know-Nothings are going to do a lot of good anymore, since no one wants to be known as a moron.

They take pride in their ignorance, not their stupidity. They may not do a lot of good for the Republican neoCon establishment, but they’ll do a lot of good for the likes of Buchanan, who’d surely prefer to take over the Grand Old Party than try to establish a new one. And the so-called “immigration” issue is where he’s going try to turn the base toward his faction—the old scumbag and ratf*cking veteran knows that when economic times are bad the Know-Nothings are more receptive to his nativist hogwash.

DTG:

Totally doesn’t surprise me that Buchanan is gracious, intelligent. Also doesn’t surprise me that he’s wierd.

Buchanan always seemed smart to me. But at the same time, there’s like a difference that I can only describe as a different “worldpicture”. His worldpicture/worldframe does not look like yours or mine. It looks kinda medieval, kinda like him being in this country that’s really a garrison, surrounded by a high stone wall, with Mexican bandits outside, riding around on horses, shooting up everything and saying “we don’t need no steenking badges” and whatnot. I’d be lying if I said I really understood it, nor do I particularly need to.

Sotomayor reading kids books means that beyond perfecting her language skills, she was also making an effort to learn the cultural idioms and references of the US mainstream. 
And Buchanan has his tightie whities in a twist over this?

Think of America as a gigantic male bladder.

And think of Republican electoral power in America as the urine in that bladder.

In 2006, America had to urinate, and so all of that urine was evacuated through the penis of America, Florida
DTG in STL on 06/04 at 12:09 PM

Dammit DTG, now you’ve got me trying to figure what part of America Texas is, anatomically speaking, if Florida is the penis.

Dammit DTG, now you’ve got me trying to figure what part of America Texas is, anatomically speaking, if Florida is the penis.

The grotesquely enlarged prostate, I’d imagine.

“The time has come,” Buchanan said,
“to talk of many things:
Of prejudice — and rigidness,
Of cabbage-headed kings,
And why the Right is boiling mad,
and whether nuts have wings.”

(apologies to Lewis Carroll…)

He gained some praise for his criticism of the invasion of Iraq, but it wasn’t rooted in any sort of belief that the war was immoral.  The man wrote a book about why it was wrong for Roosevelt to engage in WWII following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

As far as I’ve been able to tell, the difference between the neoconservatives and Buchanan is that Buchanan seriously and truly believes in the concept of national sovereignity—believes in it almost too fervently. It seems to me, this is where Iraq crossed his red line.

The first few days of my freshman year at a college that consistently is in the top five in the US News and World Report rankings we all had to take a series of tests to place us in various courses.  One of them was a grammar exam.  Many, many, many of my fellow classmates bombed that exam.  And they were native speakers.

In my parents’ generation, most of the immigrant/international student population in many US universities were not always verbally conversant in the English language.  Their written English, however, was often comparable…..and sometimes far better than their US-born counterparts…...and this was during the 1950’s and 60’s. 

Nowadays, nearly everyone I know who teaches/TA’s undergrad courses have complained about the noticeable decline in written English proficiency compared with previous generations of college students.  What’s more interesting is that most of this decline is not really influenced by newly arrived immigrant/international students as many Americans tend to believe, but by “native-born” American students who were either ill-served by poorly run schools and/or slacked their way through K-12 and allowed to get away with it until they arrived on campus. 

And those “native-born” US students have the nerve to complain about “foreign” Profs/TAs with “strong accents”*......

* As every US student who has made this complaint IME was really doing it to excuse mediocre/failing performance as a result of slacking or not taking the class/school seriously, any complaints of such ilk automatically raise “red flags” in my mind that the complainer is a lazy mediocre student attempting to find excuses for his/her poor academic performance.

And the so-called “immigration” issue is where he’s going try to turn the base toward his faction—the old scumbag and ratf*cking veteran knows that when economic times are bad the Know-Nothings are more receptive to his nativist hogwash.

And yet, surprisingly, every recent poll I’ve seen in regards to the immigration debate shows that far fewer Americans are concerned about it today than was the case just four years ago, when we were far more economically stable (at least on the surface, anyway).

The fact is, most Americans aren’t freaking out about Hispanic immigrants in America.  The only people who really feel deeply threatened anymore are the strident diehard conservatives.  Just a few short years ago, the supposed “immigrant threat” carried a lot more weight with centrists than it does today.  Most people just don’t care as much today as they did in 2005, and almost everybody recognizes that the proposition of deporting 20 Million people at once is utterly absurd and impractical in every imagineable way.

<blockqutoe>And yet, surprisingly, every recent poll I’ve seen in regards to the immigration debate shows that far fewer Americans are concerned about it today than was the case just four years ago, when we were far more economically stable (at least on the surface, anyway).</blockquote>

Yeah, the Socialcons have really done a reverse Midas on that one, turning what appeared to be electoral gold into complete crap.

As far as I’ve been able to tell, the difference between the neoconservatives and Buchanan is that Buchanan seriously and truly believes in the concept of national sovereignity—believes in it almost too fervently. It seems to me, this is where Iraq crossed his red line.

Which is why Pat Buchanan is much more of a paleoconservative than he is a neoconservative.  He’s actually not too far removed from Ron Paul, ideologically speaking.  And unlike most neoconservatives, Pat is no fan of the state of Israel, which seems to be one issue where there really is absolutely no consistent belief among rabid base Republicans.

As far as I’ve been able to tell, the difference between the neoconservatives and Buchanan is that Buchanan seriously and truly believes in the concept of national sovereignity—believes in it almost too fervently.

He’s essentially an old-style isolationist and protectionist populist, which means (racism aside, but not anti-semitism) he’ll often find common ground with left-wing extremists—Lenora Fulani is the most prominent example.

And in many ways….Pat Buchanan and others of his ilk remind me of those US students complaining about “foreign” Profs/TAs with “strong accents” to explain away their own shortcomings…...

Yah, good point about Israel, DTG in STL. Which I guess might be non-negative thing, all considered.

The weirdest part about Pat Buchanan to me is realizing that the dude really and truly fears hispanics, and is invested in white supremacy, yet is not stupid. Don’t know why, that blows my mind.

Nowadays, nearly everyone I know who teaches/TA’s undergrad courses have complained about the noticeable decline in written English proficiency compared with previous generations of college students.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading DKos diaries, it’s how many terrible, terrible incoherent writers there are out there.

And then you have people like MattY who only by dint of their position in life have been able to get anywhere while being such a terrible speller.

There are plenty of people who are extremely intelligent but whose brains don’t process spelling for some reason or another (dyslexia being common).  I see the point that this is what spellcheck is for, but I really resent the idea that someone is stupid because they can’t spell easily.  (I say this as someone who spells wonderfully.)

And those “native-born” US students have the nerve to complain about “foreign” Profs/TAs with “strong accents”*......rolleyes

G. says that the TA of his who had the most impenetrable accent by far was from Scotland.  They always had to make the guy repeat things three times, and they were all supposedly native speakers of the same language.

Most conservatives these days want to return America to a bogus version of 1953. Buchanan’s shooting for bogus 1923 (if not bogus 1853).

Except in bogus 1953, American had a manufacturing base and affordable homes and a strong social safety net (courtesy of that evil monster, FDR). In real-life 2009, When a Know-Nothing JoeDuhPlumber discovers that he has no bloody shot at becoming a $250k-ionaire, he starts longing for bogus 1923. In bogus 1923, you didn’t need an egghead college diploma to get on top, and no uppity minorities were insisting on sitting at the front of the bus; all you needed to succeed was to be a white, heterosexual, Christian male.

I’m not so sanguine that this sentiment has diminished in the Know-Nothing 20% that formed the Bush base. If anything, some of them are going to be more enraged that they were bamboozled by the neoCons’ cheap-labour globalism (which they’ll pin, as they do so many of Commander Flightsuit’s decisions, on Obama).

Buchanan is a rabid anti-Semite.  He was against the Iraq war because Jewish neocons were behind it. Eventually he got into the same bargain that GW did: pretend you can tolerate Jews if you can get them to give you money and votes for wars, glorious wars.

Nowadays, nearly everyone I know who teaches/TA’s undergrad courses have complained about the noticeable decline in written English proficiency compared with previous generations of college students.

I heard similar complaints from my professors back in the late ‘80s. I long ago came to the conclusion you did regarding the root of the problem: systemic and funding failures in public K-12 schools.

G. says that the TA of his who had the most impenetrable accent by far was from Scotland.  They always had to make the guy repeat things three times, and they were all supposedly native speakers of the same language.

In college I took a chemistry course from a prof who had recently crossed the pond from Oxford. He had one of his postdocs give a guest lecture. The guy was a Yorkshireman. Oh. My. God.

“Most conservatives these days want to return America to a bogus version of 1953. Buchanan’s shooting for bogus 1923 (if not bogus 1853).”

...just as long as he goes back far enough that he would stop dirty Micks like his ancestors (with difficult-to-understand accents) from being allowed into the country.  Keep America Pure!  (...for whoever they would allow to live here…)

I really resent the idea that someone is stupid because they can’t spell easily.

Perhaps that’s true. But people are only willing to give you the benefit of the doubt if you have some kind of privleged background. You think Sotomayor would have gotten as far as she did if she were a poor speller? Poor spelling is reflective of a certain amount of carelessness that we only let “slide” when someone with the right background does it. See, again, George W. Bush and his inability to use language.

just as long as he goes back far enough that he would stop dirty Micks like his ancestors

The funny thing is that Pat Buchanan’s is Scottish protestant on his father’s side and gets his Catholicism from his German mother’s side. Any attempt by Buchanan to associate himself with “the hard working blue collar irish” is a put-on.

MikeEss, I agree with you that when privileged individuals are allowed to get away with poor linguistic skills in general (not just spelling) where other groups are stigmatized for the same it is a problem.  However, I also have family and friends who are dyslexic and struggle with things like spelling, and are treated as if they are stupid whenever the reality is just that their brain does not process that information.  The same thing happens with people with dyscalculia and other disorders.  Learning disorders should not be stigmatized, and symptoms of learning disorders should not be written off by themselves as stupidity, and I really don’t care what the class of the individual is.  Kids with LDs are treated like shit by their peers regardless of their class, but the difference is the foot they get off on in life.

George W. Bush was a walking plethora of learning disorders, IMHO, but he was also not very bright even when not taking those into consideration.

“Pat Buchanan’s is Scottish protestant on his father’s side and gets his Catholicism from his German mother’s side.”

OMG!  You mean he’s the product of a multi-cultural, multi-religion, mixed marriage?  How very scandalous.  How can he live the the shame of it?...

Yorkie!  Cu ye ni di!

Like Yorkie play this.

Buchanan is interesting for a number of reasons; the most important is that he really is a charming and extremely intelligent fellow; he’s just hitched all that up to this absurdly odious personal philosophy.  He’s like a case study in compartmentalization.

Oddly enough, he’s the only conservative commentator I ever feel like I learned something from after watching.  He really is pretty bright.  He’s just bizarrely foul, as well.

exholt:

Nowadays, nearly everyone I know who teaches/TA’s undergrad courses have complained about the noticeable decline in written English proficiency compared with previous generations of college students.

This may have something to do with the fact that the teaching of the structure of English is appalling in both design and execution.  English as a structural concept is shockingly easy, but when courses are designed to teach it those efforts seem to bog down in unnecessary complexity and lust for the myriad of wholly bogus rules piled onto English which have their roots in Latin (split infinitives spring to mind).  Worse, I can recall no effective teaching of English structure (Gr.1 1970 - Gr.13 1984) which had what was most necessary:”  “here’s the basic structure, the bones if you will; here’s how we fit the bones together to make a skeleton; here’s how we put muscle and skin on the bones”.  It went from insultingly basic to ravingly complex.  There’s nothing wrong with complex, I know; we need it.  But when you disconnect that complexity from what exactly you are doing and why you are doing it then you have failed as a teacher or course-writer.  You have puked rules onto students, and kidded yourself that you’ve taught them.  You should have been giving them a tool kit and showing them how each tool works and when to use it.  Instead you shoved them into the Sears hardware section and said, “see?  Tools.  Lots of tools!  Now fuck off, the next class is coming in.”  (Part of that may have been the timing of when I got my education: in the post-60s era when curricula were shaking off the rulers-on-the-knuckle outdated rote learning but going too far the other way.)

There seems to be no effective middle ground in the teaching of grammar: curricula seem to vary wildly between “ignore it and maybe the problem will go away” on the one hand to “why should I teach you how to grow things when I can make you spend four months staring at individual bits of dirt?” on the other.  I love English, I love its capacity to be both laughingly simple yet capable of incorporating and expressing great complexity without collapsing under its own weight (which, for example, French and German cannot boast).  But that love went entirely unrequited in school so far as Learning How was concerned.  I learned by osmosis from my obsessive reading, not from my classes.  It is the linguistic equivalent of being a musician without knowing how to read or write music.  And I went to good schools and had some effing marvellous teachers.

Gracchus:

I heard similar complaints from my professors back in the late ‘80s…

... might lead one to conclude that a problem also lies in the oldest hobby of all amongst professors: complaining about the ignorance of each new crop of students.

exholt, my wife came here from the Philippines 17 years ago, and they use a kind of business English that is almost the same as Standard American English.  She has observed time and again native speakers of American English making mistakes including college graduates that were co-workers at various points in time.

INTPagan:
Count me among those who still wonder whether Bush wasn’t bright, or was very bright but actively hostile to learning, thinking and pondering.  If I HAD to bet I’d go for the latter.

I learned to speak English on Sesame Street.

i r stupit

I was also brainwashed by public funded programs. I read Pandagon.

As an undergraduate level TA I spent a great deal of time working with students on how to write and annotate a college level essay. From what I saw it was largely a funding issue. Most private schools or public schools in affluent areas have an expectation that the student population will go on to college and help the students prepare their writing skills. In underfunded areas it really seems as if it is reliant upon having faculty who have the time to work with kids on an individual level, which is going to leave the majority of students unprepared.

This is par for the course for Buchanan as far as I am concerned, both the racism and the twisted anti-intellectual bias.

I don’t get it. These assholes bitch at anyone who even suggests we try to make it easier on non-native English speakers by providing material in Spanish or other languages. If they want to be here, then they need to learn ENGLISH, DAMMIT! And they need to do it immediately with no help from us!

But then if someone tries to do things to improve their English (or arguably in this case, to assimilate to the anglo culture), then they are stupid and doing it wrong?

One of the defining elements of oppression is that you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. This is a classic example.

The problem, though, is that if you are intelligent and still hostile to learning, what’s the difference?  I would still call that not bright at all.  Intelligence that is actively discouraged on one’s own part does no one any good, is unquantifiable, and shouldn’t be considered until it is actually exercised, which is why I say that I think he wasn’t bright.  I am more sympathetic whenever it’s a case of someone, like a woman, who has been told for their entire life that being smart iad, but I have my doubts that Bush, coming from a rich Ivy League family, ever heard that kind of message, so potential sympathy is lost.

I do think that he probably could have used serious emotional intervention as a child, as well as testing for learning disorders (because I would guess he is severely ADHD as well as dyslexic).  He had a pretty shitty upbringing, as upbringings with silver spoons in mouth go, and he seems to have a lot of problems that were neglected.  If he is bright, he probably used it to overcompensate for his learning disabilities in non-academic areas.

That doesn’t excuse taking it out on the world.  I don’t feel sorry for George W. Bush the former President who did his hellbent best to destroy this country and the Middle East.  I feel sorry for George W. Bush when he was a child.

“being smart for their entire life is bad.”

My computer loses keystrokes, or I think faster than I type, and I’m not sure which.  (ADHD here, not to tip my hand.)

Exholt, in the interests of fairness, when I went to get my EE degree, the strong accents of MANY of my teachers were so strong that it completely impeded the ability of the students to learn. Seriously, we had an Iranian professor whom I could not swear, in a court of law, that he even was speaking English.

So, seriously, it’s not all racism. Some professors (and some disciplines have it worse than others) really ARE incomprehensible. Interestingly, the incomprehensible ones were usually also assholes and almost always had lived in America for at least a decade. Take what you will from either of those factoids.

On the literacy note, I’ve actually taught college students who had remedial English skills. The native born students had usually been recruited for the sports teams and wrote the way they spoke and thought - which is to say, they just kind of transcribed random streams, often without verbs or nouns. They were good kids, really wanted to learn, but they’d been horribly served by the public school system. The foreign born students, on the other hand, often knew more about obscure English grammar rules than I did - they just had trouble putting it all together into a sentence, quickly and with the proper pronunciation, spelling, etc. It was an interesting learning experience for me.

I can’t help but be reminded of Nixonland, where Nixon inquires if this Buchanan fellow is “as conservative as Buckley”.

So, seriously, it’s not all racism. Some professors (and some disciplines have it worse than others) really ARE incomprehensible. ...

I know what you mean, Essie. When I was in LS we had one exam by a visiting French professor (that is France French, not Quebecoise) that was so badly written that I and some other students forced the proctor to stop the exam and go get another prof who taught the same subject.  That prof was also baffled by the incoherence of the question; in the end, he instructed us to answer as if the question meant X, and logged it so that it would be marked that way.

... might lead one to conclude that a problem also lies in the oldest hobby of all amongst professors: complaining about the ignorance of each new crop of students.

That may be true as plenty of American friends from the baby boomer generation and older have mentioned how English proficiency was lacking among their college classmates. 

However, one Prof I’ve chatted with complained because she got fed up with receiving an increasing number of student essays littered with “IM speak” and written in stream of consciousness style.  The former is never acceptable in academic writing except when quoting from other sources and the latter is never appropriate when writing a research paper for advanced undergrad history/politics seminar courses usually taken by graduating seniors.

INTPagan:
Using your use-based definition, there is no difference.  Using a capacity-based definition there is a difference.  Apples and oranges, and both right and good for you.

As for Bush’s upbringing: you can have the smartest kid, you can tell him that he’s smart, but you bring him up in a cold and demanding home where nothing he does is good enough and his brothers are all seen as better ... Well, then, yes, emotional intervention would probably be a necessity.  One of the things that always radiated off Bush when I watched him, even back in his TexGov days was the seething, just-under-the-surface anger of the man.  The chip on his shoulder stood out a mile.  To my eye it was most visible in his nickname habit, which was a way of controlling even the identities of people around him as he’d always been controlled by family and friends both as child and as a business figure.

Your other points are neatly encapsulated by a former colleague, a communist: “I really don’t mind him being born with a silver spoon in his mouth.  I do mind him stabbing people with it”

Grammar simply isn’t taught in schools anymore.  This would be fine if it were supplemented with hard-core reading and writing curricula, but our school system sucks, generally speaking.  It also doesn’t help that our culture sneers at learning and reading.  Especially by the time they reach adolescence, kids don’t give a shit about either, which is likely why so many Americans don’t (or can’t) read or write beyond a sixth grade level.

I was very lucky to have intelligent, well-educated parents who encouraged me to learn beyond what I was taught in school and to have access to unusually good public schools.  They still weren’t as good as private schools or as good as public schools in most European countries, but I definitely wound up ahead of the pack.

When I was in LS we had one exam by a visiting French professor (that is France French, not Quebecoise) that was so badly written that I and some other students forced the proctor to stop the exam and go get another prof who taught the same subject.  That prof was also baffled by the incoherence of the question; in the end, he instructed us to answer as if the question meant X, and logged it so that it would be marked that way.

OMG, I had almost the same thing with one of my Iranian professors. We asked him to rephrase the question and he kept insisting (I believe) that he “no help during test”. And we were like, “No, this word problem doesn’t even have a VERB, we don’t understand what you are asking for.”

Ugh. It was hell, truly, and that was almost every class I took at that school. A state school. Widely known. Yeah. Everyone “failed” that particular course, but of course he curved us all up so that no one would ask questions. Meanwhile, Essie learned nothing in that class. Great.

Hum.  I know a white WASP straight male who, because of moderate dyslexia, decided, while he was studying for his PhD in Physics (but he must have been a lightweight regardless!), to improve his writing and communication skills by absorbing “Checkmate” (popular Canadian English grammar text we throw at freshmen) and doing hours of self-study in the basics of the language.  Because, like Sotomayor and other professionals in N America, he realized his written English had to be authoritative and persuasive if he wished to make the most of his other credentials.  In other words, brilliant people all of stripes often need to brush up on some aspect or another of their warehouse of abilites, and know it.

I call that wisdom.  Buchanan’s logical contortions are surreal.

one Prof I’ve chatted with complained because she got fed up with receiving an increasing number of student essays littered with “IM speak” and written in stream of consciousness style.  The former is never acceptable in academic writing

Well, yeah, but how are the students supposed to know that if they aren’t told?

Chances are, they didn’t just wait until college to start handing in IM speak papers. Profs (and I should know - I almost was one) should gripe about the SCHOOLS, not the STUDENTS.

However, one Prof I’ve chatted with complained because she got fed up with receiving an increasing number of student essays littered with “IM speak” and written in stream of consciousness style.

This problem may be wider than the use of language.  Our culture, for both better and worse, has largely broken down the concept that certain modes of conduct are acceptable in one area but verboten in others.  From inconsequential things like dressing up to go to the theatre to important things like appropriate language for appropriate situations we now often use a One-Size-Fits-All mode of conduct.  If one accepts that premise then one becomes less likely to be surprised that students think that one form of written communication is acceptable in other contexts.

Exholt, the other problem that I have seem (admittedly only with first years) is using Wiki for soruce material. You can write DON’T DO IT in the syllabus until your hand fall off and you will still get 30 out of 50 papers that use Wiki citations. It will be interesting to see if either IM speak or certain internet citations are ever acceptable in certain academic work.

Agreed on the apples and oranges, but it still doesn’t make a lick of difference to the world around you if you don’t use it, and that’s why I say that, for all intents and purposes, the man is stupid.  He can be a world-class genius under that idiotic smirk, but if he refuses to use it, well, it’s useless.  (Not to mention that he ever had to prove intelligence to have the world handed to him on a platter anyway, which would explain why, even if he had the potential, he never had to use it and so of course wouldn’t demonstrate it.)

I agree on Bush’s emotional issues.  I read a book about his psychological profile written by a psychologist who basically compiled everything he could about Bush biographically and from the media, and the man had a very, very sad childhood.  He also took it out on everyone else.  I like that quote, Seeker.

As for grammar, I think that it’s intuitive more than something that can be easily taught.  I have never, ever struggled with it, and yet couldn’t explain grammatical rules.  I know people who could explain rules but have a hard time applying them.  Maybe I’m just a weird case, but I can’t imagine grammar being something that one learns rather than simply comprehends upon hearing repeatedly.

Eh, using Wiki for source material is appropriate under certain circumstances. Granted, on a paper about Alice in Wonderland, it isn’t appropriate because there is much more authoritative information out there that should be used instead.

However, if I ever assigned a paper on, say, flash mobs or something else relatively new and for which a whole lot of “authoritative” stuff hadn’t yet been written, I would accept a Wiki quote, provided that it was clear that, you know, it’s a Wiki quote and to be taken as such.

There’s a time and a place for everything.

Didn’t see Essie’s comment.

  Most of the instructors I know use a liberal grading policy with undergrads and give opportunities to rewrite papers. The intent is to help students get accustomed to expectations and become better writers, not chastise them. Of course, this does not apply accross the board but I think (or maybe hope) the majority of people who work with undergrads try for it.

Over and over again, I ran up against students of a certain age who’d been educated in California public schools and had no idea how to punctuate.

Basic punctuation: the comma, the period. No less anything more complex, like the colon or semi-colon. The idea that a sentence should be a complete thought was beyond them. The poor dears.

“But the teachers told us to just write!” they’d protest. Unfortunately, that emphasis on unfettered “creativity” hampered their ability to express themselves in written English.

You don’t even want to know about the soggy mess of haggis that comprised a Phd thesis from that bunch.

Most of the instructors I know use a liberal grading policy with undergrads and give opportunities to rewrite papers.

That’s good. I’m a big fan of that - gives a student to see how to do better in that particular case and it usually sticks better.

There are definitely the I’m-functionally-illiterate-and-proud-of-it out there, but in my opinion those are fewer and farther between than the I-really-want-to-learn-but-am-embarrased-and-scared-so-I’ll-pretend-I-don’t. Once I spoke to the students one-on-one, the bluster usually faded and I could see they really did want to be able to read and write effectively - just without seeming to want that (uncool!) and most of them were pretty scared that they’d never measure up, which can be self-defeating.

IMHO, a good prof can go a long way towards alleviating that fear.

Essie- Sorry I didn’t make myself clear. Using (and identifying as such) a Wiki quote is fine, I was talking about students substituting Wiki info when they have been asked to use peer reviewed journals or other academic resources. I’ll hand out an essay guide that clearly states how many and what type of citations are required and get back papers where all the citations are Wiki. Given what I teach, if I didn’t allow for many different sources, I’d get some thin papers!

I hate to get all philosophical, but language changes over time.  That’s why we have more than one language in the first place.  Most English speakers have never even heard of the subjunctive mood, so now “If I were 10 years younger” is “If I was 10 years younger”.  Now, I’ll get all angry annoyed when people use possessive apostrophes or get homophones mixed up, but I try not to let it get to me.  The point of language is communication, and what’s “right” is what is effective at getting a point across.  There’s a very fine line between being disappointed at the lack of education we offer to students, and sounding like a grumpy old man complaining about that dern slang kids are using these days.  Some day IM speak might be standard, and I don’t really see that as a bad thing.  There’s nothing inherently better about our current language.  Personally, I think the entire English language is completely screwed up, and I wouldn’t mind if we all switched to a more sensible language, like Spanish or even Italian.

Also, just to thread-jack, how many of our Pandagons use the Oxford Comma? I cannot NOT use it, but I never see anyone else at work use it. Granted, I’m surrounded by engineers, but I’ve even had a high school teacher or three try to get me to stop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

Hee hee. I am a “serial” comma splicer. I have to have my friend in the English department edit my work or it just becomes hopeless.

The real reason students use Wikipedia as a source isn’t because they actually think it’s a good source.  Some of my classmates in college would do it just because they waited too long and didn’t have time to look up anything better.  Their reasoning is that it’s better to turn in a bad paper than none at all.

Essie, I am a proud user of the Oxford Comma.

I am also torn between the hopeless pedant who despises seeing a language I love being butchered, and the common-sense person who realizes that what passes for proper English right now is nowhere near what would have, say, a hundred years ago, because languages are as alive as the people that speak them.

Not to mention that a lot of my visceral irritation is at Ebonics because I was raised (not so much by my parents as just societally, I think) to think that it was an ignorant perversion of English, and I see the racism and privilege in that viewpoint, and understand more now than I used to.

I was talking about students substituting Wiki info when they have been asked to use peer reviewed journals or other academic resources.

Oh, I’m on the same page now. I was thinking back to some dinosaurs that were, basically, “Anything with DOT COM or WIKI in the name is not a Valid Source!” (Dot Gov and Dot Edu were allowed. Net and Org were questionable.)

I really prefer the serial comma, because it makes things less ambiguous.  There are times when you can use “and” in a list differently than just adding the last item on that list, and it is differentiated by its lack of comma.  For example, consider the sentence:

We’ll have meatloaf, peas and carrots, bread and butter, iced tea, and mashed potatoes.

I think it is clearer with the extra comma.

The real reason some students use Wikipedia as a source ...

Yes, there’s some of that, sure.

But there’s also the first years who have never researched anything in their life, ever, because the HS didn’t ask them to, and they take the first thing they find on Google. And I don’t want to ignore that fact or go on a “kids these days” bender, because I think it’s a distraction from the fact that our schools are fundamentally sending our students to hell in a handbasket.

Hell, I had to be told, as a college student, the differences between com, org, net, edu, etc. and we were the first house on my block to have Teh Internet, back in the day. Kids aren’t born knowing this stuff.

Also, just to thread-jack, how many of our Pandagons use the Oxford Comma? I cannot NOT use it, but I never see anyone else at work use it. Granted, I’m surrounded by engineers, but I’ve even had a high school teacher or three try to get me to stop.

That’s weird. I’ve been taught to use it since elementary school. In college, the attitude has been pretty much “Some people use it. Some don’t. Who cares.”

From what I saw it was largely a funding issue. Most private schools or public schools in affluent areas have an expectation that the student population will go on to college and help the students prepare their writing skills. In underfunded areas it really seems as if it is reliant upon having faculty who have the time to work with kids on an individual level, which is going to leave the majority of students unprepared.

Oddly enough, at the private college I attended along with my observations of socio-economically privileged students at Ivy/Ivy-level schools, the issue of English proficiency wasn’t limited to those ill-served by poorly funded public schools. 

At my undergrad, I’ve seen far too many graduates from topflight private boarding schools and affluent suburban publics who also had serious issues with poor writing skills.  Some struggled to the point they were placed in remedial writing courses and/or ended up on academic suspension.  And quite a few of them were so confident right before the start of the year that their “superior” private/affluent public school education would help them outshine those of us who attended urban public high schools*. 

After graduating, I’ve had many encounters when visiting friends on Ivy/Ivy-level campuses where their private/affluent public school educated friends would ask me why they received C level grades on their essays upon finding out that I was an academic tutor in college.  In the vast majority of cases, the Prof/TA was being too kind as the essays were so incoherent and poorly written that they really deserved an F and instructed to go to their campus’ writing center for an assessment of their writing proficiency. 

* And I was the John McCain of my urban public high school’s graduating class. 

Exholt, in the interests of fairness, when I went to get my EE degree, the strong accents of MANY of my teachers were so strong that it completely impeded the ability of the students to learn. Seriously, we had an Iranian professor whom I could not swear, in a court of law, that he even was speaking English.

So, seriously, it’s not all racism. Some professors (and some disciplines have it worse than others) really ARE incomprehensible. Interestingly, the incomprehensible ones were usually also assholes and almost always had lived in America for at least a decade. Take what you will from either of those factoids.

This may be true, but the good conscientious students who had this problem didn’t whine and complain endlessly about “foreign” Profs/TAs with strong accents to excuse their mediocre performance like the complainers I’ve encountered.  They had no need to as they tend to take the initiative to overcome the issue whether it was making an extra effort to go to the Prof’s/TA’s office hours, paying closer attention in class, asking/demanding clarification as necessary, and/or TACTFULLY bringing up the issue with the Prof/TA or departmental chair and escalating until they get a response. 

I’ve had many instructors with strong accents…..yet I realized that as a college student…it was MY responsibility to take the initiative to overcome the issue…..not for the university/college or Prof/TA to cater to me…..especially when all of the complainers I’ve encountered do so in offensive and immature ways or can’t be bothered to even inform them of the problem in the first place. 

Kinda like what seeker6079 did when s(he):

I know what you mean, Essie. When I was in LS we had one exam by a visiting French professor (that is France French, not Quebecoise) that was so badly written that I and some other students forced the proctor to stop the exam and go get another prof who taught the same subject.  That prof was also baffled by the incoherence of the question; in the end, he instructed us to answer as if the question meant X, and logged it so that it would be marked that way.

The complainers I’ve encountered were too overentitled, lazy, and deeply imbued with racist tendencies to even bother.

Also, just to thread-jack, how many of our Pandagons use the Oxford Comma?

I got out of the habit back when I had to use AP style and now I only use it occasionally.  I’ve been editing a book with my boss and we get into interesting comma fights sometimes.

I use the Oxford comma because I was told an apocryphal story about a judge deciding a will case where the children were suing over the division of an estate. It was to be left to Joe, John and Susan, and she said that the judge found that the estate was to be split 50% to Joe, and 25% to John, and 25% to Susan.

But then again, she also was batshit insane and said that abortion was encouraged by racists who wanted to kill off blacks and hispanics, and told us that we should all keep pure, which seems very scary now, but didn’t set any alarm bells off at the time. Growing up in Texas….

See, Seebach, that’s why I use it!  It makes differences in sentences like that.

Seeker6079,

Just realized my placement of your blockquote may make it seem that I am equating you with the tactless immature lazy complainers.  I meant to quote you as an example of what good conscientious undergrads SHOULD be doing to overcome the problem in question.  My apologies.

Not unlike Seebach’s example: The best argument for the oxford comma I’ve ever seen comes from the Chicago Manual of Style in a hypothetical book dedication: “I’d like to thank my parents, Mother Teresa and the Pope.”  Is that a list of three things, or is the writer defining the first item?

I suppose the oxford comma thing is not unlike making yourself familiar with cultural items you know others—in Sotomayor’s case, the anglo-majority—take for granted.  The purpose in following grammatical rules (prescriptive, descriptive, however) is to ensure you are making yourself clearly understood to your audience.  Writing and speaking become problematic, if not useless, when they are unintelligible (a la “say what I mean, mean what I say”).  Same thing with cultural references: most everyone reading this sentence understands the implication of “Pat Buchanan’s nose is growing like Pinocchio’s.”  Learning those types of references strikes me as similar to learning how to conjugate a verb—necessary to communicate well.

I was already highly impressed with all I’d heard about Judge Sotomayor’s background and education.  Unlike “Crazy Uncle Pat,” now I am absolutely in awe of someone with the insight to realize, at or near college age, her need to grasp and perfect the finer points of grammar and literature that many of her Ivy League peers likely took for granted—and to have the drive to go out and accomplish it at a valedictory level.

re commas:

The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath.
Elizabeth Clarkson Zwart.

Exholt, I was painting the situation with a broad brush and some of my experience could be specific to the area I live and teach in (which is highly stratified).

  Since we are already off topic…

  I am a big fan of getting the students acclimated (or at least making a game attempt) to writing academic essays and then giving them the option of doing a creative final project. Spoken word, documentary, music, dance, visual art- whatever they want to do to engage the subject matter. Yet, the majority of students end up turning in an essay anyway. The ones who don’t have produced some amazing work, though.

exholt:

Seeker6079, Just realized my placement of your blockquote may make it seem that I am equating you with the tactless immature lazy complainers….

(Looks baffled.)

But I AM a tactless, immature, lazy complainer! 

But the apology is sweet, and I thank you for it.

I tend to use Oxford commas in my writing as that was how I was taught in elementary school and I find it often helps in adding clarity to the sentence.  That’s not to say I use them uncritically as there are times when using them will add ambiguity when it is not desired.

This may be true, but the good conscientious students who had this problem didn’t whine and complain endlessly about “foreign” Profs/TAs with strong accents to excuse their mediocre performance like the complainers I’ve encountered.  They had no need to as they tend to take the initiative to overcome the issue whether it was making an extra effort to go to the Prof’s/TA’s office hours, paying closer attention in class, asking/demanding clarification as necessary, and/or TACTFULLY bringing up the issue with the Prof/TA or departmental chair and escalating until they get a response.

That may have been the case at your school, but mileage DOES vary. At my school, “going the extra mile” didn’t do jack shit. The TAs and profs didn’t keep their office hours - period, to the point where I got one TA is trouble over it (by accident) and was actually physically threatened in the hallways later by the prof. “Paying closer attention in class” doesn’t even make sense in many cases and is just a cop-out to blame the student - did you read the part where I said I wasn’t even sure the prof was speaking English?

Asking/demanding clarification - well, you didn’t read where we DID ask, as a class, for clarification on a single question, and were given a hearty “fuck off”. And, believe me, tactfully or not, these profs were aware of the situation and ddn’t care - some of them actually seemed to enjoy it, like the one who decided to lecture on the “Wizard of Oz” in my “Electronics 1” class on the grounds that only a handle of us would catch on.

The head chair didn’t much care that one of his profs physically threatened me - language was the least of his concerns.

So, yeah, you can bet your ass I “whined and complained endlessly to excuse my mediocre performance” - because there wasn’t much else one COULD do. And, as I mentioned, this wasn’t an obscure school. So, can we cool it on the student blaming? Not all “bad” students are racist, lazy, fucks. Some just really do have shitty, horrible teachers. Thanks.

“Paying closer attention in class” doesn’t even make sense in many cases and is just a cop-out to blame the student ...

The ivory tower equivalent of a snake oil faith healer saying “you weren’t cured because your faith wasn’t strong enough” .

I was taught the Oxford comma in grammar school and never stopped. I didn’t even know it was distinctive—it just struck me as the right thing to do in terms of reducing ambiguity.

And I remember how one of my English teachers in high school would give an automatic “F” on any paper he encountered with a sentence fragment, because it was taken to be a sign that you didn’t proofread it before handing it in.

Looking back on it, I learned some of the most important lessons in writing in high school: use simple, clear sentences, don’t use flowery language, keep the introduction brief, and concentrate on clarity.

The thing is that we were assigned to write a 5 page paper every two weeks. That’s easy for a teacher to grade when he has 12-15 students per class. It’s much harder when a teacher has 30 students per class.

Seeker, exactly. It’s so very common to blame students for everything and - in my experience - 90% of student complaints genuinely are valid. And, again, I say this as someone who spent some time teaching college students, many of them nearly illiterate and the ones deemed most likely to fail, and I never got any complaints. But, then again, I took my job seriously - not as a playground with tenure. There’s a reason why most students now prefer to go to community college and it’s because the teachers are generally better because it’s a calling or a job, but definitely not a sinecure.

And I remember how one of my English teachers in high school would give an automatic “F” on any paper he encountered with a sentence fragment.

Our American school system, such a shining thing to be proud of.

And - caveat - none of the above rant applies to Pandagon professors, all of whom - I’m sure - are wonderful. Just that I’ve had some doozies in my time.

don’t use flowery language

Does not apply to Marcel Proust.

I’m still trying to find that Proust-sentence-actually-diagrammed-completely poster one of my English profs had. No luck so far.

I’ve been using the serial comma for as long as I can remember.  Though I do remember having to relearn how to spell some words when going to university in the U.S. after high school in Canada.  The specific incident that comes to mind was losing points on a first-year chemistry exam for spelling the name of the sixteenth element s-u-l-p-h-u-r.

Essie, do you remember the Onion obituary headline on Proust in Our Dumb Century?

“Marcel Proust finally Dies –  We thought it would go on forever”, say loved ones.

Our American school system, such a shining thing to be proud of.

Actually, I meant that comment about my high school English teacher approvingly. I mean, really, if you can’t be bothered to make sure that your sentence doesn’t have a verb, what the hell are you doing?

The ability to write well is one of the most important skills you will ever develop. I’m happy my high school had some strict standards about that. High schools are either willing and able to do this, or they aren’t. If they’re not, you end up with a lot of naturally bright students who got all A’s in high school without having to face significant challenges who then get hit with a ton of bricks when they hit college.

Kaninchen, I’ve always used British spellings (depiste being public schooled in the US).  I don’t know why; I just think that they are more eloquent-looking.  This often leads to Word saying that I’m misspelling words such as “behaviour”.

They can eat my face; I like my pretty, proper spellings.

Despite being public schooled.

Of COURSE it’s on the grammar/spelling thread that I decide to make typos.

And the keyboard is definitely losing keystrokes.

Agreed, Tyro.

kaninchen:
There is a placed reserved in hell for teachers who do not credit valid alternative spelling.  Color is right, colour is right.  No minus points for either,. but a caution about using the correct spelling in the correct country.

Still, the distinctions are breaking down.  I can not recall whether defense or defence, prioritize or prioritise is the Commonwealth spelling, for example.

Orwell once remarked that one of the most interesting things about American English was the ability to turn any noun into a vowel by adding -ize.

If they’re not, you end up with a lot of naturally bright students who got all A’s in high school without having to face significant challenges who then get hit with a ton of bricks when they hit college.

Ding ding ding, Tyro.  My HS had great teachers that way.  We were often graded not on what was acceptable in HS but what was required in post-secondary.  As a result our HS had amongst the lowest grade-drops (almost nothing) when its students went on to university.

And I remember how one of my English teachers in high school would give an automatic “F” on any paper he encountered with a sentence fragment, because it was taken to be a sign that you didn’t proofread it before handing it in.

Heh, I had an English teacher in 7th grade who had a list of 30 grammatical and spelling rules that would result in an automatic fail on book reports and such. By the time I entered high school, those rules were second nature, freeing my mind up for other things. But it was a private school with small class sizes and admissions selectivity.

Also, just to thread-jack, how many of our Pandagons use the Oxford Comma? I cannot NOT use it, but I never see anyone else at work use it.

I use it—not using it isn’t a bad thing, but it matches my cadence and helps make things less ambiguous. I do tend to drop it for shorter, clearer and un-ambiguous lists (like this one). It’s a stylistic tic, but a consistent one.

As for Wikipedia as a primary citation source on an undergrad- or grad-level paper? I don’t think so (I wouldn’t mind a “via Wikipedia article [URL]” secondary citation, but that sort of academic standard is probably a long way off).

In any case, whether we’re discussing proper grammar or proper citations, the only Americans who seem to think using either are negative things tend to be Know-Nothings and those who pander to them. Which brings us full-circle back to (the very articulate) Pat Buchanan.

Am I the only one who wonders why conservatives who bitch so often about education are also hostile to actually paying for it?  Cut the Pentagon’s budget by only 5% and you could dramatically increase class resources across America. 

It seems to me that they don’t necessarily want everybody to have a good education, they just want to complain about those people who don’t have them.  (And, as the case of Sotomayor shows, complain about those who DO have a good education, but Aren’t One Of Us.)

I had plenty of teachers with accents at my university, and in my case, students really did use it a an excuse for failing the class.  I might have some special ability to understand almost anyone, but sometimes classmates would complain about teachers who “don’t speak English” and I thought “WTF are you talking about?”.  Most of the teachers they complained about were easier to understand than someone with a strong southern accent.  In fact, the hardest teacher to understand was one with a British accent, and even that wasn’t difficult.  I noticed it was usually a combination of self-entitlement and xenophobia, so that when these people heard a foreign accent, they simply just didn’t bother to pay attention.  Most of these students were childish and selfish in other ways too.  They would show up to class late, and ask for extra points on a test because they tried hard or they didn’t know what to study (I guess they want the teacher to tell them exactly which paragraphs to memorize).  When students are lazy, they should be blamed for their problems.  It’s not the teachers’ responsibility to hold their hands and coddle them.  There probably are legitimate cases where a teacher’s accent is too heavy, but at my university, it was a bunch of irresponsible students who wanted to blame someone else for their failure.

If they’re not, you end up with a lot of naturally bright students who got all A’s in high school without having to face significant challenges who then get hit with a ton of bricks when they hit college.

This is really the crux of the issue: it’s unfair and costly to everyone—students, faculty, parents footing the bill—when a college admits high school graduates who can barely read and write at a grade 8 level. And that’s putting aside numeracy and other gaps in basic knowledge. It’s not a question of fixing college education, it’s one of fixing secondary education.

For those interested in a brief discussion of why things are in this state, I’d recommend Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs—an exceptionally clear and fine writer.

I had an English teacher in 7th grade who had a list of 30 grammatical and spelling rules that would result in an automatic fail on book reports and such.

The nice thing about this is that since you were in 7th grade, the stakes were lower—you could fail a couple of papers without having it ruin your GPA when you applied to college… which does go to show that you really have to teach good habits early.

Actually, I meant that comment about my high school English teacher approvingly.

And I used to wonder why so many of my illiterate students had gotten frustrated, disillusioned, and had given up. But, no, if you have a single fragment in your paper: F. Yeah, that’s a great way to encourage learning over mindless, brutal pedantry.

Heh, I had an English teacher in 7th grade who had a list of 30 grammatical and spelling rules that would result in an automatic fail on book reports and such.

And I had a teacher who didn’t know the difference between Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Kafka’s. But I digress. Really, mindless pedantry and “zero tolerance grammar rules” are the best way to take a struggling 7th grader and turn him into a disillusioned 8th grader convinced that they’ll never amount to more than Walmart night shift manager.

Seriously, I used to teach kids who had been given a shitty education by our schools. And I hve no idea that this “I am Grammar God” ego tripping contributed heavily. There’s a special place in hell reserved for those who use teaching as a club to ego-trip past their own mediocrities.

Oh, and one more thing about mindless pedantry: Some of the world’s greatest authors have utilized deliberate use of sentence fragments to create beautiful works of art. So Mr. Hobart From 8th Grade One Mistake Is A Failing Grade (And It Might Not Need To Be One Mistake, If You Are a Non-Approved Race, Gender, or Religion) or whatever can bite my literary butt.

Essie: On the one hand, there’s the fact that kids really do need to learn proper habits at a younger age, and I don’t think they are adequately taught.

On the other is the fact that being too harsh in this implementation tends to be rough on kids who struggle, as you noted, as well as disproportionately hitting kids who are learning disabled but undiagnosed.  I never had the problems with my writing being “careless” that the teacher there noted, but it wasn’t so much because I was extremely attentive with my schoolwork as because English was always intuitive to me, and took little to no effort.  I was lucky in that area, but my math and science grades dropped the most whenever my ADHD surfaced.  I sympathize with what you’re saying.  (I’m having more problems focusing now than I used to, and my writing is suffering for it now.  I am upset and irritated at the errors that I encounter in my own writing lately, and I hope that seeking medication will help.)

I also think that there is a huge difference between a writer who knows perfectly well how grammar works using sentence fragments and a seventh-grader who is still grasping the basics in communications using fragments.  The former tends to be for effect, and the latter tends to be from ignorance, and it does need to be dealt with.  I do agree that the automatic failing grade is harsh, though.

Wikipedia can be a pretty good tool for streamlining a research effort.  If you get an entry that features a lot of citations to other sources you can at least go to your library and start tracking down the materials the entry editors referred to.  If you like that sort of thing (and I do) you’ll often find other stuff along the way.

Like the time I was tasked to write a lit research paper on (mathematical) chaos and periodicity in chemical reactions.  Turns out the guy who’d assigned it to me, Werner Horstemke, was credited in a bunch of the then-recent research.  Neat stuff.

That was my favorite class ever: Advanced Topics in Physical Chemistry.  There were supposed to be some grad students there also but they dropped it before the semester started so it was just me and him.  We’d meet in his office a few hours a week, talk about math, chemistry, SF (we both liked Sheri Tepper), and Shaker crafts and architecture, then I’d spend eight, ten hours in the science library.  Sheer, utter bliss.

Oh yes, I’m a big nerd.

Really, mindless pedantry and “zero tolerance grammar rules” are the best way to take a struggling 7th grader and turn him into a disillusioned 8th grader convinced that they’ll never amount to more than Walmart night shift manager.

I provided a disclaimer regarding the school—I’m not saying it’s a one-size-fits-all solution. That particular teacher was tough in other ways, too, but she was fair and knowledgeable and fun and compassionate. Her 30 rules were not presented as an adversarial “gotcha” challenge, but the way things are in this school, in this class. After the initial gasp of fear, everyone adjusted quickly. I don’t think anyone thought of her as a petty tyrant—even those who failed a paper (which was usually a one-time only occurence).

There is also something to what Tyro says about the stakes being lower in 7th grade, even though it’s reasonable to expect students of that age learning to write essays to proofread their work. That sort of rigour would be too stressful for elementary school students (they’re just learning the rules), and probably would play less well in high school.

So Mr. Hobart From 8th Grade One Mistake Is A Failing Grade (And It Might Not Need To Be One Mistake, If You Are a Non-Approved Race, Gender, or Religion) or whatever can bite my literary butt.

Which brings up another point: by high school, we were being encouraged to experiment with and outright break the rules we’d learned earlier. And that grade 7 teacher was part of that school’s larger process.

I also think that there is a huge difference between a writer who knows perfectly well how grammar works using sentence fragments and a seventh-grader who is still grasping the basics in communications using fragments.  The former tends to be for effect, and the latter tends to be from ignorance, and it does need to be dealt with.

My point was that there are rules and then there are rules. A LOT of “English” rules are, in fact, taken over from the Latin and don’t make sense anymore. Not spliting infinitives does not make sense. Not being able to start a sentence with “and” or “but” is stupid. Failing a paper automatically because of a fragment (“I looked down at my feet in chagrin. One word. No, three. Covered with mud.”) is asinine. I mean, for christsake, I had a teacher who would scream at us if we used the word “like” in a sentence because she hated “like” so much from the slang. Resulting in screaming shrew hollering at me because I said something along the lines of “Cats are just like people that way.”

Teaching to the rules doesn’t help children learn. Exposing them to good writing, assigning frequent writing assignments and helping them to correct their mistakes - that helps them learn. All the other pedantry shit? Well, that is something up with which I will not put.

I’ve always been very good at using correct grammar, but even I would be intimidated by the threat of an F with just one mistake.  Sometimes it really is a mistake, and you won’t catch it when you proof-read, especially if you’re 12 years old and not perfect.  If I had a teacher like that, I would be so obsessed with making sure there are no sentence fragments that I wouldn’t care about any other aspects.  I think it’s a big power trip to fail kids for just being 12 years old and not perfect.  I had a professor in college who routinely forgot that the students don’t have Ph.D.s like he does, and it was not a good atmosphere for learning.  I think the only case that deserves an automatic F is plagiarism or other cheating.

I agree with your last paragraph, Essie.  I would guess that the most likely reason that I always wrote well and never really had to bother remembering all of the grammatical rules (seriously, I barely remember the parts of a sentence, could barely diagram a simple one, and know very little about actual rules) is because I spent most of my time reading.  So yes, I’m with you on that, and I think the best way to encourage kids to write well is to encourage them to read, because they will imitate what they read (whether they know it or not).

INTPagan, oh definitely. I’m a big proponent of teaching by exaple, because you do pick it up. The best Comp1 teacher I ever saw basically assigned a whole slew of ‘book reports’ (from enjoyable books, no less!!) and cared less about the content of the writing than just being sure that the student was doing the reading under the theory that they would pick up the rules if they read and enjoyed good writing. Worked wonders.

Catgirl, ditto.

catgirl, I think that people are perfectly capable of rereading an essay and making sure that all sentences are complete sentences. Particularly in middle school when paper assignments are relatively short. In 7th grade, you can afford to fail a couple of assignments before catching on. It’s not the end of the world, particularly when there are other parts of the class to be graded on. It just becomes a red flag to the teacher that the student needs more attention from the teacher and that the student needs to pay more attention to his writing.

And, Essie, there are plenty of opportunities for the unique and precious snowflakes who want to experiment with sentence fragments during any proposed creative writing assignments. At some point, you have to learn all the rules. If, when reviewing a paper, I came across, “The simulation terminated quickly. Convergence: A clearly linear function!” I’d propose some editing changes.

Tyro, that can be accomplished through discussing the errors with the student or pointing them out on the paper without automatically failing them.  I see where they’re coming from; you can have kids who are learning disabled who just see that they started failing things and say, “Fuck it; I give up.”  I pretty much did that in high school, and it wasn’t for lack of intelligence; it was because I couldn’t focus on the work in most of my classes.

It should also be considered that recreational reading is not sufficiently encouraged, and is probably the most prominent cause of coherent writing in history.

I had a professor in college who routinely forgot that the students don’t have Ph.D.s like he does, and it was not a good atmosphere for learning. .

(Laughing.)  Tell me about it.  I had a prof for a seminar class in LS who was an internationally recognized figure in his field.  He would assign truckloads of reading for his once-weekly four hour class, which NOBODY did in its entirety because it was impossible to do so and, you know, do anything for any other class.  He became enraged one day and tore us up a strip and down the other for not doing the readings, and how could we be ready to participate in the class, etc. etc., whilst simultaneously noting that any and all opinions or views that we had were pissant and not even worth listening to!  He was so strung out in his rant that he never even noticed the students exchanging glances and smiles at the fact that he was really complaining about our inability to draw a square circle to his satisfaction: what would be the point of so much preparation for the sole purpose of discussing something with someone who did not want to hear what we had to say?

I think that a proportionality rule should apply when assigning homework at HS or post-secondary level.  Work out how many work available there are in a week (i.e. not counting eating, errands, sleeping, etc); then take out sixteen hours per week that you can or should assume that the student is doing paid part-time work; then take out class and commuting time.  Whatever homework you assign should take up only the percentage of remaining hours which your class occupies in the student‘s schedule.  If your class occupies only 4 of the student’s 28 classroom hours then your assignments should represent a maximum of 14% of the student’s “free” time.  The “300 pages per week for a short seminar” crowd should get some perspective.

If you think about it, even that allocation of time is unfair.  If every teacher or prof did it then the student would have no extra time for talking with classmates, learning, relaxing, bring-all-together pondering, or thinking about her life in particular or life in general…. Or drinking, dancing and making love for that matter.

Well, Tyro, you’re a success story from the “zero tolerance” Grammar Nazi. Congratulations. Want to bet how many English-as-a-second-language students get marginalized because of those practices? Or does it not matter because they were clearly morons who couldn’t proof-read.

And, Essie, there are plenty of opportunities for the unique and precious snowflakes who want to experiment with sentence fragments during any proposed creative writing assignments. At some point, you have to learn all the rules. If, when reviewing a paper, I came across, “The simulation terminated quickly. Convergence: A clearly linear function!” I’d propose some editing changes.

And, THAT, sir, is a goalpost change. I never said that the magic snowflake children shouldn’t have to endure the horror of an edit request. I said a single mistake should not equal a failing grade.

Argue in good faith and don’t move goalposts, please.

I’m with Essie Elephant on this one. Sentence fragments should not be used unknowingly, but they can often make a point better than a complete sentence. I had generally excellent teachers at a generally excellent school (HS, although it’s true of college too, come to think of it), and most were death on bad grammar and spelling - but they didn’t auto-fail the students because of it. The paper could bleed red from all the corrections but still not fail, and most teachers would raise a grade if the student turned in a corrected version wtihin a week.

The one exception was my eighth grade English teacher, who told us that any misspelling would fail the paper. He got some truly boring papers, because every student avoided like the plague any word they couldn’t spell correctly in their sleep (this was before the era of spell-checkers). I never really learned much writing from him - he seemed more interested in being a bully for pay than in teaching students.

Really, any teacher who has a “any mistake of variety XYZ equals a failing grade” would receive an irate call from me, were I a parent (I’m not) and were I not already planning to home school (this particular issue is reason #862).

Not to sound like a motivational poster, but mistakes are just an opportunity to learn and do better. And, yes, a failing grade CAN and WILL make many students give up out of complete hopelessness, assuming they can’t possibly get any better - so what’s the point in trying.

School is NOT about perfection. It’s about learning. And I’ll bet a year’s salary that none of these Grammar Nazis were perfect either. In fact, there’s a thought: If Grammar Nazi makes a grammar, spelling, or punctuation mistake on ANYTHING he writes that year (syllabus, chalkboard, student papers), he doesn’t get paid. Think he’d agree to that?

catgirl, I think that people are perfectly capable of rereading an essay and making sure that all sentences are complete sentences.

One mistake does not mean that someone didn’t proof-read.  It’s not that difficult to make one little mistake, and then you get an F because of it.  That’s really hard on someone like me has mild OCD.  I would always be thinking that even though I did everything else well, one little mistake could take it all away.  I would have to proof-read it absolutely perfectly.  I can’t miss one single sentence fragment.  That means that my attention couldn’t drift for a single second.  I could work really hard and lose it all because I just didn’t focus enough while proof-reading.  I’d have to read it 10 times just to make sure.  It’s really easy to skim over one single mistake when you proof-read your own work.  If I had a teacher like that, I wouldn’t even have time to care about making it a well-written paper, because what’s the point if I might get a big fat F anyway?  It seems like my time would be better spent to make absolutely sure that there is not a single sentence fragment so I can at least get a C.  I wouldn’t want to take the gamble that I might have missed one.  Sure, most people don’t have OCD like I do, but it’s a lot of pressure to put on a 12-year-old (or anyone) that if you overlook one single sentence fragment while you are proof-reading, all your work counts for absolutely nothing.

So Mr. Hobart From 8th Grade One Mistake Is A Failing Grade (And It Might Not Need To Be One Mistake, If You Are a Non-Approved Race, Gender, or Religion) or whatever can bite my literary butt.

Which brings up another point: by high school, we were being encouraged to experiment with and outright break the rules we’d learned earlier. And that grade 7 teacher was part of that school’s larger process.

The way one of my writing instructors explained it to me, many believe that before one can be given license to break the rules of grammer and style, one must first demonstrate that they know what those rules of grammar and style are.

There’s a difference between throwing the word “ain’t” into your writing consciously, where you are fully aware that you are breaking the rules and doing so purposefully, and throwing that word in there because you honestly think it’s an “acceptable” word.

Oh, and before anyone even bothers to bring up Microsoft Word, spellcheck, and the grammar editing thing, it’s crap.  It flags everything, even if there isn’t an error.

True, DTG, about the difference (I pointed that out earlier), but, at the same time, there are other ways to communicate the rules than by automatically failing.

The one exception was my eighth grade English teacher, who told us that any misspelling would fail the paper.

English spelling or American spelling? Or did it just depend on the colour/color of the student handing in the paper?

Which is another of my points: There is no English rule universally agreed to. Even the Oxford Comma is discouraged or prohibited in some schools of though. Unless the Grammar Nazi is handing out MLA or APA or Chicago handbooks at the beginning of the syllabus, it’s basically just a way to fail anyone he dislikes.

Eh. Look, I understand the perspective that you don’t want to discourage people from writing. But I think the thing was from the perspective of my teacher was that it was a fairly simple and straightforward process to detect a sentence fragment. If there is a sentence fragment in your paper, then it was a clear sign that you weren’t paying attention when writing it (as another teacher I had once wrote in his syllabus, “If you can’t bother to read your paper, why should I?”).

Want to bet how many English-as-a-second-language students get marginalized because of those practices?

Well, this was not a remedial class for people not proficient in English. However, just because someone isn’t a native English speaker doesn’t mean they don’t understand simple concepts like “a complete sentence.”

My solution would be that repeat offenders would simply be forced to turn in their paper earlier than others, which the student and the teacher would then proofread, and then the final paper could be turned in.  There’s a word for papers that aren’t edited: they’re called rough drafts.

There’s a difference between throwing the word “ain’t” into your writing consciously, where you are fully aware that you are breaking the rules and doing so purposefully, and throwing that word in there because you honestly think it’s an “acceptable” word.

Thank god we have telepathic teachers, then.

Or does the teacher just assume that the “good” students (insert bias here) were being creative and the “bad” students were being stupid?

Not to sound like a motivational poster, but mistakes are just an opportunity to learn and do better.

I would agree with this and pose the question about how far we want learning-style mistakes to translate into lost grades.  Competition to get into uni is manically ferocious and a teacher has to factor in whether or not his or her exacting standards are torpedoing a good student, leaving her outside the loop while a lesser student with a more forgiving teacher gets in.

Tyro, you’re still pretty much entirely leaving out the concept of undiagnosed learning disorders.  I don’t think you’re being an asshole, but you are.

If you can’t bother to read your paper, why should I?

Well, sir, because you’re being paid money to read it.

You seriously think that is good teaching? “Ah, thank god, a sentence fragment on page 3, I don’t have to finish the rest of the damned paper now. F! Next!”

Your defence of him just makes him sound like a worse asshole and a worse teacher. And I say that in my official capacity of “used to be a teacher and wasn’t a complete douche while doing it”.

That and you could actually look at the rest of the paper to see if the particular problem is repeated, which can assist with addressing the problem in more detail since you see what happened.  It’s like showing your work in math.

Competition to get into uni is manically ferocious and a teacher has to factor in whether or not his or her exacting standards are torpedoing a good student, leaving her outside the loop while a lesser student with a more forgiving teacher gets in.

Which is why many of my friends avoided the “smarter” AP-type classes like the plague, because they preferred to be bored to tears and learn nothing than not get into their college of choice.

AP-type ?

Advanced Placement.  It was relatively new when I was in school; it’s replaced Honors.  They take college-level classes and receive some college credit for their high school coursework.

If there is a sentence fragment in your paper, then it was a clear sign that you weren’t paying attention when writing it.

This is simply not true.  People make mistakes, even when they are trying very hard not to.  You can’t imply from one mistake that someone wasn’t paying attention or didn’t bother to proof-read.  I’m sure that teacher has made mistakes even when he is paying attention.

There’s a difference between throwing the word “ain’t” into your writing consciously, where you are fully aware that you are breaking the rules and doing so purposefully, and throwing that word in there because you honestly think it’s an “acceptable” word.

And why isn’t it an “acceptable” word?  Is it just become some authority of language decided it’s not an acceptable word?  What makes some words acceptable and others unacceptable?  If almost everyone knows the meaning of “ain’t”, I think it’s more acceptable to use than something that very few people understand, like “ungulate”.  The purpose of language isn’t to follow a bunch of rules; it’s meant to convey ideas effectively.  Who gets to decide which words count and which words don’t?  The majority of people do, whether they are experts or not.  Why is “Wikipedia” and acceptable word?  It’s acceptable because most people know the meaning of it, and that’s the point of language.

BTW, “ain’t” is legitimate anyway.  Historically, it was invented as a contraction for “am not”.

Advanced Placement.

If there is a sentence fragment in your paper, then it was a clear sign that you weren’t paying attention when writing it.

Again, if Grammar Teacher makes a single mistake that year (not just sentence fragments, because - really - he knows better, being the grammar expert and all!), he doesn’t get paid for that year. Easy.

The purpose of language isn’t to follow a bunch of rules; it’s meant to convey ideas effectively.

On an unrelated note, this is my most frequent criticism of Ben Stein.

Catgirl, also - before I dash home - I had a grammar teacher in college (great guy!) who insisted, in all seriousness, that “ain’t” was an acceptable contraction for that very reason.

there are other ways to communicate the rules than by automatically failing.

Sure. But at some point, everyone knows that you shouldn’t have sentence fragments in your paper, and you want to instill some form of discipline and make sure the students edit their work without forcing some kind of “rough drafts are due, and then you edit, and then you turn in the final copy,” which is middle school “introduction to how to write an essay” stuff.

Judges aren’t going to respect unedited legal briefs. Grant committees don’t respect poorly edited proposals.

I think the aforementioned English teacher used that method as a sort of “prepare a bowl of M&M;‘s with the green ones taken out” clause in contracts—if you didn’t do that, then you probably didn’t bother to follow the provisions in the rest of the contract. If there’s a sentence fragment in your essay, it’s likely that you didn’t bother to proofread.

The best English teacher I ever had was when I went to a local community college in place of my senior year of high school.  For the short homework assignments, she had three possible grades: excellent, good enough, and not good enough.  She told us that throughout life, most of our writing will just have to be good enough.  Excellent and good enough got full points, and not good enough got an F.  However, so let students re-do all assignments as many times as they want during the semester.  The longer essays were given standard letter grades.  We were allowed to re-do those too, as many times as we wanted until we got a grade we were satisfied with.  I learned more from this teacher than I did in all three years of high school.

I will say, honestly, I understand the idea that there is formal English that you should use when appropriate.  When I was taking the SATs a few months ago and got to the essay section, I wasn’t sure what rules applied, and so I refrained from using personal pronouns and the like, because there are just certain rules for certain occasions.  I scored well, but apparently didn’t have to follow that rule (says the partner in crime, who used to teach essay prep).  I’m glad that I’d learned that, though, and think that it is good to teach when it’s okay to use what words and forms.  That doesn’t mean being an asshole, though.

Orwell noted that Queen Victoria would have said “ain’t” .

http://books.google.ca/books?id=fCRLPIbLP8IC&pg=PA27&lpg=PA27&dq=orwell+queen+victoria+said+ainèt&source=bl&ots=J1X45lUflr&sig=jiTYrAAjFhnvybBZYRfmovt0yfQ&hl=en&ei=RDooSvqVMsafmAfIyvjdBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#PPA27,M1

True, DTG, about the difference (I pointed that out earlier), but, at the same time, there are other ways to communicate the rules than by automatically failing.

Oh, absolutely agree.  I should have clarified my statement indicating that I don’t condone outright failure in these cases, just that I understand why some instructors push hard for grammatical correctness in early years.

Judges aren’t going to respect unedited legal briefs. Grant committees don’t respect poorly edited proposals.

*blinks*

Yes. Yes, exactly. We must fail high school children who let a fragment slip into their work because one day they will be a judge and society will crumble.

Perfection!

Tyro, again, you are completely neglecting the impact that undiagnosed learning disorders can have on people.  ADHD kids, dyslexic kids, and other kids like that, are not being lazy.  They are not computing.  As someone who has been called lazy my whole life for my inability to focus on things other people find rudimentary at best, I know what that’s like, and it’s horseshit.  You try sitting and staring at a paper when proofreading is like trying to hold sand (words, sentences, punctuation) in a sifter (your brain).  I am very lucky that my linguistic skills were as good as they were, because I would have been a nightmare in high school otherwise.  At it was I generally failed even those classes because all I did was turn in papers while neglecting the rest of the work.

I like the idea of that teacher, Catgirl.

Judges aren’t going to respect unedited legal briefs. Grant committees don’t respect poorly edited proposals.

There’s a huge difference between one single mistake and unedited or poorly edited work.  I’m with Essie on this one.  If this teacher ever makes a single grammatical mistake the entire year, he shouldn’t get paid.  Even the bestest, most perfect, grammar-king English teachers can miss mistakes during editing.  He should be held to the same standards that he holds his students to.

I had a grammar teacher in college (great guy!) who insisted, in all seriousness, that “ain’t” was an acceptable contraction for that very reason.

It is a perfectly acceptable contraction, not because of the history behind it, but because it is so commonly used and recognized.  I don’t say it, but when I hear someone else say it I don’t throw a fit or get all snobby.  I understand what they say and I have no problem with it.  Language changes and that’s not a bad thing.

We must fail high school children who let a fragment slip into their work

First, you don’t fail the class, just the paper. There will be more papers after that.

Next, I was trying to explain that the adult world of writing generally doesn’t look very kindly on poor editing. Writers somehow manage to churn out work regularly without submitting work with egregious errors. Sooner or later, you have to learn to do this, too. It’s part of the skillset of writing.

Hmmm…

Nope.  Despite all the intelligent things said here I still can’t see a reason why Pat Buchanan isn’t an insulting twerp.

Seeker, this is prolly the biggest thread derail I’ve ever seen, but damn, has it been enjoyable.  Nonetheless, yes, Pat Buchanan is still a douchenozzle.

Despite all the intelligent things said here I still can’t see a reason why Pat Buchanan isn’t an insulting twerp.

Granted. Intelligent people who use grammar and language correctly can still be demented, racist assholes.

I’ll bet a year’s salary that none of these Grammar Nazis were perfect either.

The teacher in my case wouldn’t have claimed that, but she didn’t have to: she was the teacher, not the student, and could safely be assumed by the school and parents that she understood how to express herself in several formal and informal modes of writing. The same assumption did not hold true for her students, even though (via admissions testing and interviews) we were assumed to have learned in K-6 or have the ability to pick up basic grammar and spelling rules quickly and review our own work (I’m talking about things like avoiding the “grocers apostrophe” [sic]).

The way one of my writing instructors explained it to me, many believe that before one can be given license to break the rules of grammer and style, one must first demonstrate that they know what those rules of grammar and style are.

Exactly. But it in my case it was more than a question of license by high school—in certain of my English classes, it was expected on certain assignments. But even then, I doubt that would have saved me from being corrected or admonished because I used, say, “its” instead of “it’s” incorrectly (that was one of the 30, so by that time I didn’t have to worry about making that mistake).

English spelling or American spelling? Or did it just depend on the colour/color of the student handing in the paper?

As one of my English high school teachers told me on this very issue (and others), as long as it was consistent and didn’t make me look like an uneducated dolt, it was fine with him. By that time it was more about “finding your voice” than adhering to the Chicago Handbook, and sometimes “ain’t” is part of that voice.

Again, though, it was an unusual school, an aberration, even compared to other private schools. They either screened out or accommodated students with learning disabilities, and didn’t admit those who were unprepared or unable to handle the regimen. And before anyone cries “racism,” I’ll note that they had an aggressive recruitment and scholarship programme for minority students and students from “disadvantaged” backgrounds.

What works in the geek factory doesn’t generally work elsewhere, but that’s not news to anyone here. However, written expression doesn’t come naturally to most of us, and I can think of worse places than middle school (freshman year of college, for example) to lay a strong and rigorous foundation for it.

Writers somehow manage to churn out work regularly without submitting work with egregious errors.

*laughs wildly*

You’ve never gotten an advanced publishing ocpy of a book, have you? And that’s after it’s already been through the proof-reading process multiple times. Hell, I found an error in a PUBLISHED book I was reading today.

You know what? The sky didn’t fall in. I enjoy the author and his work and I’ll buy more of his books despite the fact that he used a word in the wrong place. But, really, I get why we should hold 14 year olds to a more exacting standard than paid authors.

Jesus.

By the way, this is now the 15th post (by my count) where you’d pointedly ignored your stated policies and their affect on learning disabled and English-as-a-second-language students (except for saying that, luckily, they weren’t in YOUR class).

“its” instead of “it’s” incorrectly (that was one of the 30, so by that time I didn’t have to worry about making that mistake)

THAT was an automatic failing grade?!? I’m a Grammar Nazi with my OWN (professional) work, and even I make that mistake once in a blue moon.

Like I said, special place in hell for these bully teachers.

Although this thread HAS cleared up my confusion as to why so many of my students came to college depressed, bitter, disillusioned, and saying that they “hate” reading, only to later turn around and tell me that they hadn’t realized before that reading (and writing) could be kind of fun.

I really honestly wondered what our school teachers were doing to break their spirits so thoroughly. How very enlightening this thread has been.

Essie, if you don’t mind my asking, what do you do?  Do you write professionally, teach English (or writing), edit, or what?

INTPagan, currently I’m a software engineer where I get to use my English degree (writing user manuals and documentation) whilst being paid for my Electrical Engineering degree, which is a pretty sweet gig. Long term plan, however, is to go back to school so as to teach college, which I definitely enjoyed doing back when I was a student. But the money and the health insurance wasn’t so good (read: non-existent).

(Oh, and the advanced publishing copy stuff is some volunteer work I do on the side, for fun. Most publishers are more than happy to have a few extra eyes on their work and I get a steady stream of free reading, so I’m pretty happy.)

THAT was an automatic failing grade?!?

Yep. It’s the kind of mistake that can be caught and corrected by a conscientious 7th grader who’s proofreading a short double-space paper he’s submitting for a grade—if he knows that the grade will be an F if he misses it. That was the expectation in, and there weren’t a whole lot of “F"s handed out. Again, this automatic “F” policy didn’t continue past grade 7, because by that time it wasn’t needed.

Honestly, this teacher was regarded as anything but a bully by students or parents. She just set certain expectations for a certain school (one that, over the years, has graduated a truckload of professional writers—some of whom still remember her as a great teacher).

I’ve been a journalist and a copy editor in the past, and I’ve made the mistake myself. But I can’t recall one single time in my professional career where that particular mistake (or others on “The 30”) made it to print, and I credit that record (minor though it is) in large part to that particular teacher.

Continuing the massive derail - bit with an alternative POV - my experience teaching at the college/uni level (history) in northern Minnesota over the last 10 years or so was that my student’s were actually getting better with their basic grammar. It certainly wasn’t anything I was doing, it was how they were coming to me.

I figured something had changed with the teaching approach in HS (for the better as far as I was concerned!), but it was certainly a pleasant thing to note.  My students also seemed slightly less determined to tell me how they *felt* about something and more willing to show me that they could accurately summarize what they had read and make stabs in the direction of cogent argument.  I also never had anyone turn in txt speak in a paper - ever - or argue that I should give them a better grade because of their effort rather than for their results.  I don’t think I’m especially scary in the classroom, so FWIW, in my experience my students were, more or less, a pretty solid lot (and stolid, but that is a different complaint!), and with generally functional level skills in writing.

On the ‘forgien’ TAs?  Sometimes it is a real problem, pace Essie, and sometimes students are racist dipshits.  A friend of mine is multi-generation Chinese American, born and raised in LA - and her students used to complain about her ‘forgiven accent.’  While she can do a pretty mean ‘valley girl’ - she otherwise speaks perfectly standard English.

And Pat Buchanan is - and has been for all my life - an ass.

Tyro, again, you are completely forgetting that some students have learning disabilities, often undiagnosed, that may make this more difficult than you are making out.  I understand your logic, but it’s pretty shocking how you pointedly ignore it every time someone points out right in your face that not everyone has the same mental capabilities.  It doesn’t make learning disabled kids stupid or lazy; it means that they have problems processing the information; what in hell is so hard for you to simply admit about that?

I personally think that teacher probably meant well, very well may have been a nice person and an excellent teacher, but any all-or-nothing crap like that while teaching that age group is really ridiculous when considering, at bare minimum, the learning disabilities I’ve pointed out and the second-language students that Essie pointed out.

In 2006, America had to urinate, and so all of that urine was evacuated through the penis of America, Florida [...] Granted, I shouldn’t give Florida too much grief as it went blue this past year, but the analogy roughly fits.

Nah, the analogy still fits.  The economic climate turned very cold, Florida turned blue.

I think we should retire the thread for PiatoR’s win in the preceding comment.

But I won’t complain if we don’t.

Exholt, the other problem that I have seem (admittedly only with first years) is using Wiki for soruce material. You can write DON’T DO IT in the syllabus until your hand fall off and you will still get 30 out of 50 papers that use Wiki citations. It will be interesting to see if either IM speak or certain internet citations are ever acceptable in certain academic work.

I did a bibliographic analysis of the Wikipedia once, as part of my library training, and it’s surprisingly robust.  I’d actually accept it for illustrative purposes - but never as the sole or as an authoritative source. Quoting from it to show what something is generally defined as, for example, would be acceptable IMHO.

Gracchus - I don’t actually doubt that your particular teacher was a good teacher and not a bully. However, simply because s/he made a zero-tolerance rule work, doesn’t make them a good idea generally. As has been shown, an awful lot of teachers use exactly that sort of rule to excuse outright bullying of their students. There are other ways of teaching good grammar and usage that don’t have as much leeway for abuse.

It’s no coincidence, I think, that the teacher with the zero-tolerance spelling policy was eventually fired for pining a student up against a wall by the throat and screaming in his face.

And believe it or not, most of the world doesn’t kick your ass to the curb for one mistake. When it does happen, it’s usually because, like the bully teachers, they’re looking for an excuse to land on you.

PiatoR, I did go on to clarify in a later post that I was talking about students substituting Wiki for the citations they were specifically asked to use, not quotations or references used for illustrative purposes in the body of the paper. A great deal of the time I ask for peer reviewed journals or specific academic citations to get them to go to the library and familiarize themselves with academic research. Trust me, I am cool with many different sources of information, description and evidence to support their papers including song lyrics (and other popular culture items) and personal history as long as they engage and explain.

However, simply because s/he made a zero-tolerance rule work, doesn’t make them a good idea generally.

I’ve provided disclaimed after disclaimer to show my agreement. It wasn’t even considered a good idea within the school outside that particular class and grade. At the same time, though, it was integral to the 6-year curriculum.

What is a good idea is, at some point before admission to college, teaching students the basics of grammar, spelling, and writing. That requires, for most K-12 students (who cannot absorb those rules simply from reading) a degree of discipline and rigour that—judging by the quality of freshman history papers—is lacking in most American schools, private and public.

And believe it or not, most of the world doesn’t kick your ass to the curb for one mistake. When it does happen, it’s usually because, like the bully teachers, they’re looking for an excuse to land on you.

Well, I guess they’ve had one less excuse with me. And it’s come in handy over the years.

In any case, we’re not talking about students who make one mistake in one grade—it’s about otherwise capable students who make the same basic and lazy mistakes, over and over again, over the course of an entire academic (and often professional) career. My tolerance level for that, as you might guess, is pretty close to zero.

Gracchus, my impression—which may be wildly wrong—is that people were arguing much more with Tyro than with you.  You were describing actual experience from your education.  Tyro was being kind of a jerk about it.

Not that adults are generally going to pick up Dr. Seuss in their spare time,

Oh, come now, Amanda! The Lorax? I Had Trouble In Getting To Solla Sollew? (The latter being my favorite by far…)

This is great stuff.

Of course I speak as someone who just purchased the music of The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (mainly so I can play “We’ve Won!” at work—but it turns out half the CD is other music that didn’t make it into the movie at all, so I’ve never heard it). I also got some Tom Lehrer albums to go with it. Plus I often realize how much of what I have for “culture” I got from Warner Brothers cartoons…

Well, it’s become clear to me that some people just have vastly different views on what school should accomplish. For me, school should instill a love of learning, teach communication skills, and lay the groundwork for critical thought.

For others, it’s a matter of failing a student outright because their Microsoft Word automatically changed a word that they didn’t mean while typing.

That may have been the case at your school, but mileage DOES vary. At my school, “going the extra mile” didn’t do jack shit. The TAs and profs didn’t keep their office hours - period, to the point where I got one TA is trouble over it (by accident) and was actually physically threatened in the hallways later by the prof. “Paying closer attention in class” doesn’t even make sense in many cases and is just a cop-out to blame the student

Essie,

The complainers I was talking about were such that they didn’t give the attempt an effort at trying to overcome the issue constructively with the Prof/TA in question a chance.  They were either content to sit on their asses complaining endlessly and making excuses about their poor performance or they went about it in immature and offensive ways which brought understandable ire down upon them from the Prof/TA, university administration, and student groups outraged at their conduct.  You and seeker6079 took the initiative to try solving the issue constructively.  The complainers I talked about didn’t even try….or went about it in non-constructive ways. 

Complaints about Prof’s accents wasn’t a serious issue at my undergrad because of its progressive radical-left student body.  Nearly all of them tend to view all such complaints as a racist dogwhistle and a sign the complainer is intolerant of people with differing linguistic abilities.  Complaining about an instructor’s accent just wasn’t done unless the complainer wanted to be mocked as an intolerant provincial American at best….and massively protested and yelled at for being a flaming closet racist at worst by the rest of the student body. 

All of my experiences with this sort of behavior came from my visiting friends on several more mainstream campuses with most being private Ivy/Ivy-level colleges both during my undergrad and after graduating from college.  Often, these visits included sitting in on several classes just to see what my friends were studying.  Of the numerous complaints I’ve heard about Prof/TA’s foreign accents…...they all tended to come from upper/upper-middle class US-born students who were trying to excuse their mediocre/failing grades while exhibiting strong overentitlement over their socio-economic, US-born, and often racial privileges.  I just couldn’t believe the level of entitlement they felt about the university/college having to cater to their every whim when I knew that in post-college life….we won’t always have the luxury of dealing exclusively with people with good English speaking skills. 

My question to them was usually along the lines of…..What are you going to do when you encounter someone in various areas of your life with a strong accent? Are you going to figure out the most optimal way to bridge any communications issues and overcome this obstacle or are you just going to sit on your ass and go on a US-centered chauvinistic rant with some racist dogwhistles thrown in?

Did I mention that several of the Profs/TAs they accused of having “strong accents” were so labeled merely because of their “foreign looks” even though they were actually just as American-born and far more proficient in the English language than the complainers in question? I should also mention some of these Profs/TAs in question are teaching at actual Ivy league universities. 

Several Profs, TA’s, classmates, and friends who attended colleges all over the US have confirmed my own observations that there’s almost always elements of overentitlement, US-centric chauvinism, finding excuses for self-inflicted failures, and racism involved in US students’ complaints about “foreign/foreign looking” Prof’s/TA’s accents.  They also confirmed that it was a widespread problem on many campuses.  Catgirl’s account mirrored their observations and my own.

Most adult authors never come close to the brilliance of Dr. Seuss (Oh, The Places You Will Go!), A.A. Milne (Winnie the Pooh being most prominent, but his poetry being brilliant as well), Maurice Sendak (Where The Wild Things Are), and other authors like that.  Sometimes you don’t need a huge vocabulary or complex concepts in order to communicate wonderful truths that fit all ages.

A friend of mine is multi-generation Chinese American, born and raised in LA - and her students used to complain about her ‘forgiven accent.’ While she can do a pretty mean ‘valley girl’ - she otherwise speaks perfectly standard English.

One young Ivy Prof who was accused of having a “foreign accent” is American-born and has English language skills which puts most US-born college and grad school graduates to shame.

Gracchus, my impression—which may be wildly wrong—is that people were arguing much more with Tyro than with you.  You were describing actual experience from your education.

You’d have to ask Essie about that. I do agree to a certain extent with Tyro regarding the importance of writing well and the standards that form its foundation. As it happens, my school was able to successfully implement it in that 7th grade English class (of which “The 30” was only one aspect, of course). And the school was somehow able to reconcile it with a larger explicitly stated academic mission that Essie described almost as if she attended:

instill a love of learning, teach communication skills, and lay the groundwork for critical thought.

All those goals require some level of rigour and discipline as a pre-requisite. I don’t agree that a “automatic fail” policy like the ones in Tyro’s school or mine would work in the vast majority of situations, but I haven’t seen him argue that either. I’ve been working on the (possibly incorrect) assumption that Tyro went to some sort of geek factory or programme similar to mine, which is why I pointed out the similarity in the policy.

To feed into the prevailing threadjack a bit from my own (which I wrote before even completing Amanda’s post, let alone starting the comments)—one thing Dr Seuss did was mess around with the rules, on a level that a toddler could see was “wrong” and yet right somehow.

I feel kind of off-balance in the dominant conversation here, because education is serious business. We compel kids to attend school, we make their future life prospects dependent on how they are evaluated there.

On one hand, I see having “rules” as essentially a formatting issue. If you cannot or will not learn to adopt a similar vocabulary, grammar, and mental approach to a given field of work as the people you would need to cooperate with, that will be a problem. (A problem that might be balanced by a certain diversity of approach to be sure—but still, an issue).

On the other hand—I did pretty well in the school system, but when I look back on it I can’t say that I really engaged with everything I was supposed to. Nor was it generally a matter of me being virtuous. I just lucked into caring about some of the same sorts of things my schools wanted me to.

Largely from reading a lot. What I liked to read didn’t overlap the canonical stuff very much—except in the sense that the science-fiction stories I did like were largely written by people who had read this stuff, so I picked up a lot by osmosis. Most of all I guess I picked up a sense both of the standard “rules” of grammar and how it could be fooled around with to good effect. I got a sense of what worked and what didn’t.

But I generally did not understand why all this seemed like hell to most of my classmates.

My sister had an interesting (in the Chinese curse sense) experience in 10th grade math—she was assigned to a class taught by a teacher who refused to teach. The teacher was the wife of a very popular band teacher, you see, and as my sister discovered, pretty much untouchable. Her students had miserable grades and tended to be both branded as poor math students and badly discouraged from learning math. My sister, who had considerable self-confidence and good math background, did what she could to help her classmates and also undertook a rouge statistical study of her own, to make the case to the administration that this teacher had to either change or go. They basically told her to shut up, or else. She didn’t tell me about this whole adventure until we were both in college some years later.

It is very hard to separate the teaching of difficult, layered disciplined practices from the agenda of a socially stratified status quo regime. The fact is, our society only needs so many lawyers, so many civil engineers, and even only so many doctors or teachers. There is a valid need to inculcate, or at least offer to convey, structured mental discipline on many fronts—but it is very easy to confuse this with the jargon and habits of the powers that be.

I’m quite sure that one reason I did well on SATs and “standardized IQs” and the like was that my personal culture—including what I chose for myself but also what I was offered as a young child—overlapped the culture of the powerful—or rather what aspiring subalterns like my parents conceived of as the culture of their social betters. (When I was a kid, one thing I would do was randomly read books my parents left lying around—largely stuff my mother kept from college. This is why I read 1984 and glanced through a translation of Dante’s Inferno in fourth grade—that and that both of these had a bit of SF vibe to them, unlike say Old Yeller or The Sea Wolf which were more the kind of thing my mother or father respectively would have preferred I read…)

One kid I knew was disgusted that IQ tests want you to know stuff like “What is the capital of Greece?” The thing is, there is little practical reason for an American to know that particularly—we tend to know it because the canonical curriculum makes a big deal of Ancient Greece, of which Athens was definitely not the political capital. (They had none, really). It really is a way of measuring how much you’ve absorbed of a consensus that is built in part on stratification and discrimination and limiting the number of “qualified” candidates to the number of available cushy gigs.

Well, I’m glad that people like Judge Sotomayor can take on the challenge of mastering that in-group culture without having been fostered in it like I was and still beat most of us at it.

——

Hey, my music CDs just arrived!

I’ve never thought much of Tyro, but I want to jump into the thread derail with a point…

No methodology is bully-free or lazy free.  There is a big difference between stern teachers and tyrant teachers, and having a set of expectations that generally *had* to be met is not automatically suspect.

The thing is, all teaching of forms, whether that be language, music, math, or martial arts/dance require utter and unthinking fluency in the structural components in order to learn higher order expression.  It’s just hard to do anything quickly and well if you have to actually *think* on the lower order items as well as the higher stuff.  I, with a case of nasty ADD, would have benefited hugely from strict teachers, and actually, I *have* benefited more when I’ve had strict teachers, even when they give me C’s.  The whole point of auto-fails is to ensure that people are able to see the critical stuff without having to think very much by the end of the year.  Moreover, good teachers will be proactive in dealing with problems that result in multiple fails especially since they know that the student is especially motivated *not* to make those mistakes.  It’s fine to make a mistake if you just made a mistake, it’s just not so if you didn’t really understand.  We have real problems teaching language and math in this county because so many teachers tend to be half-assed in not only teaching the material, but in teaching rigor in thought and expression.  Rigor is not perfection.  Rigor is you automatically do it with success most of the time.  Conflating the two ideas as has been done in this thread isn’t helpful, and occludes a fuller comprehension of Grachuss’s point.

Seeing this thread derail is like reading every other technique vs technique thread in the lefty/teacher blogosphere.  At the end of the day, it’s about whether if you have good teachers or not, and not about the methods.  Strict works.  Loose works too.  But you still wind up learning how to use a comma most of the time such that most people understood you.

Wow.

When we geeks threadjack onto language or science we really don’t do it by halves, do we?

It’s wierd that on the internet, you want the first word, and not the last.

Why is it a period in real life, and a dangling adverb in internet life?

Re Wiki as an academic source, the main problem I have with it is the one I have with anyone citing from a USER-BASED online source that he or she could have altered themselves to prove their own argument (!): ethics.

Accuracy is only one piece of the pie.  This English prof is all for online source use (within reason), but I see an ethical issue with citing from any source you could have written/altered yourself that is passed off, on assumption, as the statement of a hypothetical other. 

When I explain this to students, it’s like a light turns on.  Wiki citation drops dramatically after that—although I still promote it as a fruitful starting point for undergrads.

allison, did you ever watch Jesse Jackson read “Green Eggs…” in his Baptist preacher’s cadence on SNL? 
Brilliant!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPxPciXcJvc

By the way, this is now the 15th post (by my count) where you’d pointedly ignored your stated policies and their affect on learning disabled and English-as-a-second-language students (except for saying that, luckily, they weren’t in YOUR class).

To you and INTPagan, I do agree that dealing with the learning disabled is a different case to deal with, but no one ever said that LDs are supposed to be taught the same as people who aren’t. And, in fact, the very definition of being LD is that you don’t respond to the same pedagogical methods that work for everyone else.

But then, just about every lefty discussion seems to go this way. People advocate policies like ones that support more walkable neighborhoods and less dependence on cars, and others will chime in with, “well what about the physically disabled? What are they supposed to do?” Well, there are exceptions. But exceptions are just that: exceptions.

All those goals require some level of rigour and discipline as a pre-requisite. I don’t agree that a “automatic fail” policy like the ones in Tyro’s school or mine would work in the vast majority of situations, but I haven’t seen him argue that either. I’ve been working on the (possibly incorrect) assumption that Tyro went to some sort of geek factory or programme similar to mine, which is why I pointed out the similarity in the policy.

Such methods can work if the students involved are academic overachievers like the ones which populated my urban public high school.  Even then, the psychological toll can be pretty steep from what I’ve seen and experienced over the years….

I had quite a few high school teachers, including a foreign language teacher in my freshman year who would take off 20 percentage points off for a misplaced accent mark or other similarly minor mistakes. 

Your experience at a “geek factory” is very similar to mine.  Never encountered a teacher who automatically failed students for minor mistakes….though I did have a foreign language teacher who routinely subtracted 20+ percentage points off quizzes/tests for one misplaced accent mark and most teachers in the regular classes taught them at an accelerated rate to the top 10% of the academic performers in the class forcing the bottom 90% of us to keep up or sink.

Though this made for a miserable high school experience, this did prepare us well for college/graduate-level work as most of my classmates GPAs were higher in college than in high school….even ones who attended Ivy/Ivy-level schools like Princeton, MIT, and UChicago.  It was an interesting experience to find college classes at my respectable private liberal arts undergrad and random classes at a few Ivies paced at a slower more reasonable rate than what I had in high school. 

Also, let’s just stop with the whole “professors know how to write\” thing.

Never said all Profs know how to write.  I know from having to read mountains of overly dense lengthy jargon stuffed chapters in various books and articles from the political science field…..and I took more than enough politics courses to be a minor….

Just that the “foreign looking” Profs I knew who were accused by those complainers of having strong accents could…..and that assessment is based on actually reading their published journal articles, books, and from conversing with them at length.  These Profs, at least, had English language skills which puts most well-educated US-born Americans to deep shame.

Haven’t got through all comments but wanted to add that it is completely kosher when learning a new language to use classic texts in that language designed for (smart) children. I speak 2 other languages (alas with little fluency now) and when brushing up my comprehension I usually use children’s books to do so because a) the grammer is simpler while still being correct, b) the vocab is simpler but still perfectly functional, c) the plots and settings tend to be less complex so you don’t get lost or frustrated and d) you may already know the story and therefore it is easier to connect vocab to context.

As an aside, reading children’s classics from a different culture gives you access to a cultural bedrock of assumptions and tropes which will forever whiz past you when you operate in that culture if you don’t know them.

Why do I get the sense that Buchanan would never have said those things about, say, Arnold Schwartzenegger back in 2003?  And, wait, was English Ayn Rand’s first language?  Let’s not forget that this is a man who thinks Sarah Palin, she of the six years in college and a murky account of whether or not she even has a degree, is teh awesome.

Just that the “foreign looking” Profs I knew who were accused by those complainers of having strong accents could…..and that assessment is based on actually reading their published journal articles, books, and from conversing with them at length.  These Profs, at least, had English language skills which puts most well-educated US-born Americans to deep shame.

Of course they did, because they had to work at it and were extra-conscious of the impression they were making.  Not to mention that the TOEFL test, which is pretty frigging rigorous from what I hear, is a requirement for entry into most U.S. colleges.  This isn’t just the case with English.  Years ago I had a Spanish teacher from Spain who said that foreign students tended to have a better grasp of grammar in their writing than native speakers.  It’s not surprising, since if you’re learning a new language in a structured school setting you are bound to start off having grammar conventions drilled into you and not picking up the lazy habits you learn from toddler-hood with your native tongue. 

Sorry Buchanan, but knowing this about Sotomayor makes me like her even more.

And, also, I’d add that there are rules that don’t matter.  “Not ending a sentence with a preposition” does not lead to increased clarity or more elegant phrasing and in fact often leads to convoluted, ugly sentences.  On the other hand, the serial comma almost always serves to clarify meaning and relationships among items in a list.  So, use it.  If it doesn’t add clarity (and there are some rare situations where it doesn’t) then don’t use it.  So not only must a good writer understand which rules to break when for maximum effect, she should also know which rules to disregard altogether.

I’m with Churchill where that preposition rule is concerned:  Errant pedantry up with which I will not put.  I’m a big fan of the Oxford comma too.  You absolutely have to use a comma between the next to last ina series and the ‘and’, unless you are talking about something like ‘peanut butter and jelly’.  Mrs. Ristan taught me that in 4th grade and I’m sticking to it.  My biggest pet peeve is the prohibition against the singular ‘their’ or ‘they’ to denote gender neutrality.  I’m NOT going to use ‘he’ or ‘him’ to refer to a person of either gender and having to use ‘he/she’, ‘his/her’, or ‘s/he’ is ridiculously unwieldy.  Fucking sue me but I’m using ‘they’ or ‘them’ until someone comes up with a better alternative that is inclusive.  That said, I do attempt to avoid the issue altogether whenever possible.  I’ll pluralize the whole thing if I can (“Students who wish to avoid late fees should pay their tuition by the 30th” rather than “A student who wishes to avoid late fees should pay his/her tuition by the 30th”).  Still there are times when you cannot refer to a hypothetical gender-neutral individual except in the singular.

I’m sorry to derail back to the post . I’m a native speaker of a latin language, and as I have never lived in the US/UK/etc my english is very heavily accented. On the other hand, my written english is actually better than many of my fellow scientists that are native speakers - precisely because I did what judge Sotomayor did: I read, and read, and read.
In particular, I read Martin Gardner’s annotated edition of the Alice books, and (as pointed put before) they are very relevant for anyone who wants to work with logic, be they a scientist like me or a judge like Sotomayor.
And despite the fact that I have read Pinocchio as a child (in the original, it’s my native language!), I still read it occasionally; it’s a complicated and interesting book, and (unlike the Disney version) both too gloomy and grammatically too subtle for children below middle school level.
@DonnaDiva: I use they also in the singular, following Jane Austen.

what is scariest for grammar nazis and buchannan alike: English is a LIVING language that ....  (gasp) ... (vapors) ... (horror) CHANGES!

It not only changes over time, but contexturally.  What is necessary in scientific writing horrifies some of our editors ... but we make them live with it because THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “THE OHM LAW”!

Grant committees don’t respect poorly edited proposals.

Bullshit.  The ones we throw out first are those that are non-responsive to the requests for applications (RFAs).  Then we hurl the blatantly off-base ones - stuff that has been done years ago, stuff known not to work, etc.  Next on the pyre are the poorly ORGANIZED ones - these usually have glaring gaps in explaining stuff, even if the science is sound.

Editing and grammar are really polish on a good proposal, but excellent science and all bases covered in response to the request at hand will push you to the top.  Grammar Nazis are not only despised in peer review in the sciences, they are frequently wrong about their tirades too, not to mention isolationist in an international research context (the brits think their screeds against “poorly written proposal with grammar mistakes” are hillarious, because the pedants tend to be pedantic about US standard English ...).

People advocate policies like ones that support more walkable neighborhoods and less dependence on cars, and others will chime in with, “well what about the physically disabled? What are they supposed to do?” Well, there are exceptions. But exceptions are just that: exceptions.

Gosh, thanks ever so for letting me know that as a person with physical disabilities I am an exception.  I completely hadn’t noticed, what with so much of the world being totally set up in such a way that I can move through it without hindrance!  Privileged wankstain.

Oh shit that was a sentence fragment!  There was no verb!  I fail.  ::cry::

Bullshit…Grammar Nazis are not only despised in peer review in the sciences, they are frequently wrong about their tirades too, not to mention isolationist…

QFT.

Tyro, your “learning disabled people should be taught differently, duh” cop-out does not address the fact that (a) many learning disorders are undiagnosed, meaning that a teacher won’t KNOW that the kid she’s failing for a dyslexia-misplaced word has an LD, and (b) LDs are not binary - they are a continuum.

I have a touch of dyslexia, nothing major but it’s there and it happens. Causes me to transcribe words wrong at time - “its” and “it’s” being very difficult for dyslexics. INTPagan has a shade of ADD, but that doesn’t keep her from seeing ‘normal’ and going undiagnosed in school. Catgirl is a touch OCD and these policies (perfect or fail) would be very tormenting for an OCD.

“Perfect or fail” should not be a rallying cry in schools. It’s a terrible, lazy way to teach, it’s a cheap way to get out of grading papers honestly, it’s a great method for marginalizing the students who don’t suck up or otherwise please the teachers, and it’s bad for pretty much every learning style there is.

Also, and I know this is just going to SHOCK you, but college level English courses don’t give a flying fuck about the occassional mistake - not only do they NOT fail you, they often won’t even MARK OFF for it, because they understand that mistakes happen and the *point* of the work is to express a clear idea, a creative point, or a basic truth about the reading material. Seriously, in college they don’t expect you to be Even More Perfect than in high school - they expect you to be creative and intelligent and to not spend all your time worrying that there *might* be an error, somewhere, in your paper. It’s also why the publishing industry doesn’t break down every time a book has a spelling error in it - which I’m coming to doubt that you read very often since I routinely find an error in the published books I read that could have even been caught by Word checkers.

Although I’m sure you’ll just go off on a tirade about how my college was dumbing everything down for the dyslexics at the expense of the good students or something. You know, a teacher could mark off points for incorrect spelling without failing the ENTIRE paper and possibly depressing an already marginalized undiagnosed LD student. You know, give them the B or C that they earned instead of an F for failing to be a perfect snowflake? Nah, that’s too radical - I’m just one of those dirty hippies, I guess. The LD students should be quarantined separately so that they don’t infect the others, the dirty broken bastards.

“Perfect or fail” should not be a rallying cry in schools.

But it wasn’t “perfect or fail.” It’s possible that some of my papers had typos in them (only 1000 words is fairly easy to edit, but it’s possible). There was a mistake that one of my teachers considered so egregious (ie, indicative of simply not having read your own paper), that he had a policy of giving an F on that paper for doing so.

college level English courses don’t give a flying fuck about the occassional mistake

Probably true. But when I submit a paper to a conference, I edit it, re-edit it, and then pass it around to my coworkers to edit it to ensure we didn’t miss anything. Sure I use a spell checker, but I learned to spell many years ago as well.

You know, a teacher could mark off points for incorrect spelling without failing the ENTIRE paper

I’m pretty sure that’s what he did for spelling mistakes. Just not for sentence fragments. I’m not sure where you’re getting the impression he marked off for bad spelling. My impression is that a student who consistently could not write a 5 page paper without a sentence fragment would probably be given lots of remedial help, because clearly the synapses weren’t firing correctly. While your concern for the learning disabled is admirable, the truth is that not everyone is learning disabled, and, once again, the state of being learning disabled is that standard pedagogy doesn’t work on them. It’s not clear why you seem to have a belief that methods that do work (and this wasn’t so much a teaching method as a warning to proofread your work before bothering the teacher with the final—not draft—paper) shouldn’t be used because there might, somewhere be an LD student wouldn’t respond. Should we gear everything towards the needs of LD students, or should we decide that when an LD case comes up we make a
special exception and use other methods?

I’m not sure where you’re getting the impression he marked off for bad spelling.

Correction. That should read, “I’m not sure where you’re getting the impression that he failed papers that had bad spelling.”

INTPagan has a shade of ADD, but that doesn’t keep her from seeing ‘normal’ and going undiagnosed in school.

Heh - I’m a touch ADHD like Bush is a touch stupid-sounding.  It’s pretty bad, but went undiagnosed because, while I was in school, I certainly didn’t appear normal (I barely graduated and failed a ton of classes), but I was smart enough that everyone assumed that I was just lazy.  Then I joined the Marines (because college was out the window unless I did something like that), and they are extremely disinclined to diagnose you with a psychological disorder that they might have to pay you for later.

I went to see a shrink a couple of days ago for the first time since I got out, and, given my list of problems, she said, “Oh, holy shit, yeah, you are; how you flew under the radar for so long is beyond me.”  (Me too.)  So I’ll be trying medication for the first time in my life for this problem, all because, not to toot my own horn, but I was too smart for anyone to catch on before - after all, smart people can’t be learning disabled, right?  They can just be lazy, or deliberately obtuse, or undisciplined, or not that smart after all.  No, smart people can’t actually have chemical problems that cause them to be unable to quite live up to their potential.  (My shrink even told me that she would have to be careful with the test results because, since it, naturally, scores to average, I might very well score average, which would be an impairment in my case, and which makes this kind of thing, again, fly under the radar for people who are above average intelligence, since, hey, they’re normal!)

Incidentally, that means that I would have had the appearance of fitting in at one of these “geek schools” right until the grades came out, and, frankly, I resent the implication that anyone who is learning disabled isn’t smart enough to be there.  (Because learning disabled kids need to be separated out and taught differently, of course; it couldn’t just be that they can be treated like everyone else with attention to their unique issues.  No, just humiliate them.)

This is starting to sound disturbingly like my Randbot libertarian ex-husband who makes the argument that schools should be set up in castes (not that he calls them that) depending on their intelligence.  He also always assumed that, even though I’m abnormally articulate, I was more stupid than him because of how I struggle with simple daily tasks (I have extreme tendencies on both sides of the spectrum towards hyperfocus and inattentiveness, and things like writing, reading, and the Internet happen to fall on my hyperfocus side).  My mother is also dyslexic and grew up in a very abusive home where she was treated like hell, frequently called stupid both in and out of school, and, as a result, never really thought of herself as that smart.

Her schools were also chock full of teachers that failed with one error.  She apparently made a lot.

I’m not saying that anecdotes make statistics.  I’m simply saying that you are not thinking about actual human beings, Tyro.  You’re thinking about statistics in your head.  There are brilliant kids with learning disabilities.  Hell, there are not-so-brilliant kids with LDs who struggle even harder with stuff like that because they can’t overcompensate to try and appear normal.  What you’re suggesting is a caste system.  I don’t think that all kids should be taught to the middlest common denominator - I always resented being taught that way and felt punished - but your way is unworkable for more kids than you know of.

Correction. That should read, “I’m not sure where you’re getting the impression that he failed papers that had bad spelling.”

We’re discussing a continuum of “Break grammar rule X and you get an automatic F”. I don’t care whether it’s sentence fragments, it’s/its mistakes, or spelling mistakes - it’s silly a terrible zero tolerance policy.

Tyro, the type of zero tolerance teaching you are advocating is *guaranteed* to marginalize students who don’t learn well under pedantry (learning disabled or not), students of a second language, and students who are already struggling with their writing. You do NOT take a struggling student and place him in a position where, no matter how hard they try, they fail entirely over a single mistake. That’s how you lose kids in the system and it’s part of the reason why we have such a high drop-out percentage.

So cut the crap that I’m somehow only arguing for the handful of autistic students or something. I’m saying that your “perfect or fail” policy for ANY grammar rule (Why are sentence fragments worse than run-ons or split infinitives, by the way? Oh, because Mr. Hobart SAID they were. I got it now.) marginalizes MORE students than it helps - and the students who DO come out alright probably would have come out alright anyway, without the zero tolerance shit.

School is not about getting perfection out of 10% of the students and the other 90% can fuck off. School is about using teaching policies that provide the MOST benefit for the MOST students. And zero tolerance does not do that. Period.

My impression is that a student who consistently could not write a 5 page paper without a sentence fragment would probably be given lots of remedial help, because clearly the synapses weren’t firing correctly.

Also: goalpost movement. We’re not talking about failing someone who *consistently* uses run-ons. You’re saying that a single run-on equaled a failing grade on that paper, no ifs-ands-or-buts.

If you don’t stop moving goalposts, I’m going to assume you’re arguing in bad faith.

Also “synapses weren’t firing correctly” is dripping with privilege and terribly offense. But I doubt you care.

What you’re suggesting is a caste system.

Exactly. Anyone with a little bit of dyslexia, ADD, ADHD, OCD, etc. must be taught separately from the other students so as to not be marginalized by the zero tolerance policy. Not only is this not possible (undiagnosis; no money, no teachers, no space), it is not desireable. There’s no reason these kids can’t learn with their peers, just in an environment where a singe mistake (mistake du jour, according to Teacher’s Pet Peeve) equals complete failure.

I don’t think that all kids should be taught to the middlest common denominator - I always resented being taught that way and felt punished - but your way is unworkable for more kids than you know of.

ADHD, you’re more eloquent than I - I’ve been struggling to convey this for 20+ posts now. Seriously, saying “I came out just fine” is not a valid reason for doing something: see spanking controversy for further examples.

Not to mention that we didn’t all come out fine, Essie.  I mean, I have a good life, and I don’t regret anything, but I would wager money that, had I been diagnosed and treated in adolescence, I would have graduated with flying colors, gone to college, and have achieved the goals I’d set out, would not have been a single mother at twenty-one (because I would have been too busy going to school), would have waited longer to have my kids so that they could have a better childhood than they will, and wouldn’t be starting school at twenty-five, petrified of failure because I am chemically just a tick off. 

Let me make this crystal clear.  I don’t regret my kids.  I regret that my son is going to be divided between two parents (and he is far more symptomatic than I was at that age, but his father thinks that our son is too smart to be ADHD, and I’m about to seek legal action to get a diagnosis because it’s so severe).  I regret that my daughter is going to miss out on a lot of my time for the early years of her life since I’ll be busy as a full-time student.  I regret that I did not have the opportunity to get all of this out of the way when I was younger.

I also, by the by, heard from several of my teachers in band classes that, if I would just buckle down and study and pass my classes, I could have gone to Julliard as a clarinetist.  No; instead what faded for me was the ability to sit down and play my instrument.  It’s not that I don’t love doing it; it’s that it’s like pushing boulders uphill to try and sit still and memorize a lick. 

So, no, we don’t turn out okay, unless by “okay” you mean “functional”.  I love my life, and I don’t have any regrets, and I wouldn’t change anything, but I feel like I’ve been robbed of a lot by an undiagnosed learning disability. 

And this makes it much, much harder to accept what Tyro’s saying.  Yes, I’m bitter.

We’re discussing a continuum of “Break grammar rule X and you get an automatic F”. I don’t care whether it’s sentence fragments, it’s/its mistakes, or spelling mistakes - it’s silly a terrible zero tolerance policy.

Well, I guess you were, but I wasn’t. I was defending a specific one. I wouldn’t regard these errors as all equally minor, and I had a certain amount of understanding from the perspective of the teacher. Run-ons, it’s/its, “mental typos”, etc., fall under the category of simple mistakes (and with run-ons can be simply subjective). Not having a verb in a sentence is a sign that you didn’t read your own work. They are worse, and that’s why he singled them out. “All mistakes are equally minor” isn’t a viable argument.

Plus, you’re assuming that all students need to be treated equally under the same policies. I never had teachers demand that I hand them a rough draft of a paper for them to go over before the final one was due. For students with consistent writing problems, that would be a requirement that they would face but I wouldn’t—because I needed less help. Teachers aren’t as lazy as you think they are: some of them have a lot of vicious expectations of their students, however.

You’re saying that a single [fragment] equaled a failing grade on that paper, no ifs-ands-or-buts.

Yes. And for most of us, it was easy to avoid that pitfall. For someone who couldn’t perform under those conditions, it would raise a red flag for the teacher.

This does give me a different perspective on our resident trolls. I don’t think I’m arguing in bad faith, but some people clearly believe that I am… which makes me wonder if other people who seem to me to be clearly arguing in bad faith don’t think they are, from their own perspective.

Heh - I’m a touch ADHD like Bush is a touch stupid-sounding.

Jeez.  That means when I say “hello” to INTPagan I’m going to lose her before “lo”.

You’re lucky you had me long enough for a reply, seeker.

And, in real life, I am not really exaggerating so much.  I have a hard time with vocal conversation as opposed to writing.

Not to mention that we didn’t all come out fine, Essie.

True, enough. I came to college hating English (though I loved to read) because I thought it was all rules and regulations and perfectionist grammar nazism. It was only by the strangest of coincidences that I ended up an English major and - after the one obligatory grammar class run by an awesome professor - realized that I have a lifelong love of literature and writing and all those “rules” I’d learned? No one out of high school takes them all that seriously. Go on - split infinitives with pride! It’s the American way. Ha.

Off topic, one of the annoying things about having an English degree is that assholes like to target you to “correct” your grammar in order to feel superior. Considering that I never correct THEM (because I have social skills), it’s pretty annoying. Considering further that the corrections are usually “OMG it’s not pronounced ‘root’ - it’s ‘roowt’!!! STUPID!” (for ‘route’), and you’ve got a handy-dandy way to identify asshole control-freaks. I actually currently work with a guy who interrupts me to “correct” that particular pronunciation every time I use it. It’s annoying, but at this point I’m working it into conversations as often as possible, just for the morbid amusment factor.

our son is too smart to be ADHD

Your ex is an idiot (you already knew this, I know). There are a LOT of very smart people (including engineers I know) with ADD/ADHD. Smart people aren’t immune from brain quirks and brain quirks don’t mean a person is dumb.

...if I would just buckle down and study and pass my classes…

Since our school system assumes an adversarial relationship between the students and teachers, that is why - in my opinion - so many students are given a poor education.

Errors on a paper? Student is lazy and not trying hard. Didn’t proofread (even though it’s impossible to effectively proof your OWN work). Distracted and hyper? Student is out-of-control or just plain stupid. Struggling to pay attention in class? Student is a goof-off. Birth control? Student is a druggie or dealer (and, of course, a slut).

Interestingly enough, I am almost legally blind without corrective lenses - a fact that neither my parents nor my teachers noticed for YEARS, despite my complete inability to read from a chalkboard (despite being completely literate at short distances) or my ‘unwillingness’ to greet or acknowlege people who entered the room (because I didn’t know they were there). Their assumptions? I was rude and stubborn. And, again, almost legally blind - that’s not something that can slip under the radar unless you’re just assuming that all children are contrary little shits (or spawns of Satan, in mother’s case) who have to be disciplined into being good because god knows good behavior won’t come naturally.

And you know what? I didn’t need to be shunted off to the near-sighted kids class. I needed to have people consider my behavior, look for reasons, correct them as best as possible, solicit feedback from the student, and monitor future behavior to see if my vision got worse (it did and, again, no one noticed). I needed a teacher who saw teaching as something one does to help the children around them, not a teacher who felt that ‘teaching’ is the process of smashing square pegs into round holes (or moving the squares pegs off to someone else’s class).

Not having a verb in a sentence is a sign that you didn’t read your own work.

Going to try this one more time.

No. It. Is. Not.

First of all, a person cannot effectively proof their own work. This is a fact, even if it’s one you’re not aware of. Second, I see fragments (mistaken ones) in *published* books all the time. I hope you’re not going to suggest that NO ONE read the book before it was sent off to the printers.

This does give me a different perspective on our resident trolls. I don’t think I’m arguing in bad faith, but some people clearly believe that I am… which makes me wonder if other people who seem to me to be clearly arguing in bad faith don’t think they are, from their own perspective

No one who argues in bad faith would ever ask themselves that question.  The bad faith thing I see about trolls is when they refuse to answer/refute your points.  They know exactly what they are doing.  It is their life goal (and purpose) to “annoy a Liberal today.”

Tyro, I don’t think you’re arguing in bad faith.  I think you have deliberate blind spots.  I don’t think you’re actually an asshole, but I do think you have prejudices that cause assholish tendencies in certain areas.  It could use some examining, but do I bear you any malice, think you’re a troll, or think you’re just doing this to be a prick?

No.

I don’t think I’m arguing in bad faith, but some people clearly believe that I am

Completely ignoring 15+ posts about the effect of zero-tolerance policies on students who don’t speak English perfectly, whether due to a learning disorder, a second language, or a low income background can do that.

Moving goalposts from “fragment = fail” to “fragment = edit” does that, too.

I can’t really think of a definition of ‘bad faith argument’ that doesn’t encompass that, actually. Oh, yeah, and the fact that you keep repeating the same thing (fragment = didn’t read paper) and refusing to address that several of us have pointed out that people can’t proof their own work perfectly.

Oh, yeah, and dismissively saying that people with learning disabilities “aren’t firing synapses correctly” and stating they should be shunted off to separate classrooms will get you called a troll, too. That and the “policies are for the majority, not the exceptions” attitude. Kind of a trifecta you got going there.

See, I have more sympathy than all that, Essie, but it’s partially because I used to argue the same thing and had the same blind spots.  It also happened to be during the time where I just thought there was something wrong with me and it was entirely my fault that I find it so difficult to focus on the tiniest mundane task, and it made it easier for me to blame myself when I blamed others with similar issues.

So no, I don’t think he’s arguing in bad faith; I just think that he has a blind spot that he can’t work past.

Oh, also, this is another goalpost move:

For someone who couldn’t perform under [fragment equals failing grade] conditions, it would raise a red flag for the teacher.

Who would respond to the red flag by failing them. For “not reading their own work”.

Rather than, you know, responding to the red flag give them the grade they deserved (B, C, whatever) and work with them to improve by increasing their self-esteem and helping them to find learning methods that will work for them.

Seriously, you’re basically trying to have your cake and eat it to by saying that anyone who had a fragment was either a lazy student who didn’t read their own work OR didn’t have properly firing synapses. And the teacher will know, magically, which ones are the lazy ones and which ones are the stupid ones who need to be sent to the stupid-kid class (pardon my sarcasm) where a fragment isn’t an auto fail.

Without working with them to discover their needs, of course, because who wants to work with those little shits?

Well, INTPagan, as Tyro alluded earlier wrt the transportation thread, he and I have had this argument about disabilities before, last November. And it was basically the same thing: We need to make policies for the healthy and the disabled should remove themselves from the conversation because they are the ‘exceptions’ and it’s “not about” us.

And my point is that a great deal of us are disabled in one way or another and it’s stupid to call the majority “exceptions”.

Too smart to be ADHD ... as an MIT alum I have to say ... um, no.

That said, I am amused by the lack of errors in books being attributed to the author.  Where I work, we have a publications department and I have worked closely with them to make sure they don’t edit out the science in the scientific publications.  During the publication of our reports, nearly everything gets revised and edited for clarity, wording, grammar, etc.  This goes for the pieces that I have to write that accompany the reports. 

My job is to be clear and to write well - perfect is somebody else’s job!  I can’t see that it is much different from other types of publications - including non-fiction books - that I have participated in writing and editing. I am not expected to know my it’s from its: I got people!

But - INTPagan - I’m never one to miss a chance to pontificate.

The fact that you think that Tyro just has blind spot (learning disabilities) and I think he’s arguing in bad faith illustrates how deeply impossible it is for a teacher to tell the difference between a sullen and lazy student versus a depressed and learning disabled student.

Which is why - instead of failing at the first sign of mistake - the teacher should take their work as a whole into account and grade the student accordingly.

That said, I am amused by the lack of errors in books being attributed to the author.

Oh, absolutely, I generally assume that book errors occured during the transcription process and weren’t the author’s fault. But the point that a mistake like a fragment means that no one read the work before it was sent out for publishing is ludicrous.

Oh, and we use Wiki for things like definitions of statistical terms.  It’s the berries!

Moving goalposts from “fragment = fail” to “fragment = edit” does that, too

One is completely free to turn in a rough draft of a paper to your teacher before the final deadline if you don’t trust your own editing skills.

You conflated “egregious error = fail” to “most any mistake = fail.”

I think you obviously see these sort of pedagogical threats as a harrassment. We viewed it as an invitation to do our work correctly on our own if we could or seek help before the deadline if we couldn’t. My teacher never took me aside and told me he wanted to see and read a draft of a paper before I handed it to him. Why? I seemed to function fine on my own. But students who didn’t got treated differently while still dealing with the same standards.

“policies are for the majority, not the exceptions” attitude.

Well, that’s what I believe, honestly. We saw this in a conversation about how to encourage people to walk more and make less use of their car. People complain that they’re being “shut out” because they “have” to drive. Well, if they “have” to drive (because of a medical issue), then they can drive. But since most of us could do with driving less, we support policies that make it easier for most of us, who can, to walk. The best I can come up with is that everyone wants to feel “included” in various ideas and initiatives.  I guess I’m more the sort of person who decides to make an exception where needed rather than trying to design an entire idea and policy around the possible corner cases.

It’s the berries!

A fun nwe expression! I’m stealing this.

One is completely free to turn in a rough draft of a paper to your teacher before the final deadline if you don’t trust your own editing skills.

Ah. So if the student has a learning disability, it’s up to him/her to turn her paper in early so that it can be corrected BEFORE the final turn-in so that they don’t get an F for that one error they missed. Of course, this assumes that there’s time to turn in the paper first. It assumes that the student doesn’t need the extra research time that they are sacrificing - while their peers are still researching and drafting, their OWN draft needs to be done now so that teacher can look at it. It’s assuming that the teacher doesn’t miss something that they later give an F for. It’s assuming that a child even knows that this is an option, and not an imposition on the teacher. It’s assuming the teacher will provide this service at all or will see it as lazy and holding the child’s hand when they should be standing on their own like everyone else. It’s assuming a LOT, actually.

You conflated “egregious error = fail” to “most any mistake = fail.”

Well, no, I didn’t. I deliberately conflated you and Gracchus because you’re both arguing the same policy (X = Y) with different variables for X (fragment, spelling, etc.) but the same value for Y (failing grade). I say “deliberately conflated” because I am arguing against zero tolerance policies in the abstract, not YOUR hypothetical Mr. Hobart specifically. If you don’t like that, mentally edit all my posts to refer only to fragments - it won’t change the content of my argument.

I think you obviously see these sort of pedagogical threats as a harrassment.

I think it generally is used as harrassment for children who aren’t white, male, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants. If your teacher was free of bias OR if your class was full of WASPS, great for you. That doesn’t mean that this kind of policy isn’t regularly used as a vehicle for harrassment.

My teacher never took me aside and told me he wanted to see and read a draft of a paper before I handed it to him. Why? I seemed to function fine on my own.

How very nice for you. How does that have a bearing on the argument that this style of teaching is unhealthy for the *majority* of students, not just you, Tyro, personally?

Well, that’s what I believe, honestly.

What do you think should be done with students whose backgrounds preclude never being able to avoid a fragment? Should they all get F’s or should they be moved to another class? Should the learning disableds be combined with the low incomes, just to save time and space?

Arguments you continue to avoid:

1. Insulting descriptions of disabled people are, you know, insulting.

2. People can’t proof their own work, not even magic snowflake children. (WASPs, in my experience, get Mom and Dad to help. Low income students often don’t have that luxury.)

3. Teaching zero tolerance does not provide a positive effect that outweights the potential negative effect on other students, so why even bother with it? Why is “it worked for me” seen as a viable defense to you?

I think you obviously see these sort of pedagogical threats as a harrassment.

One more thought on this: it’s been known for a LONG time that if a teacher expects a child to do well, that child WILL do well. If a teacher expects a child to fail, they will fail. This is true even when the teacher’s opinion has been given to them by researchers, and not through their own “intuition”.

Knowing this, do you still want to maintain that zero tolerance grading policies are a good thing for teachers to utilize? It’s bad enough that a teacher who EXPECTS a child to do poorly will somehow find a reason to give them C’s and D’s… it’s much worse when a teacher who expect a child to do poorly has a blank check to toss out F’s in the name of ‘motivating’ them or other such nonsense.

I remember that thread, Essie!  That was Tyro?

Okay, yeah, I see your point.  And, just to make sure it’s clear here, I do think Tyro has privilege blinders, and that doesn’t make it okay, any more than it’s okay for me to say something thoughtlessly racist out of privilege.  Tyro, we were a part of the educational system, too.  We are part of your society.  Your society isn’t just people who can buckle down and focus and spell every word correctly, who are neurotypical, who can walk or bike everywhere.  Um, there are a whole shit-ton of people who don’t fit your neat “majority” box.  And your telling us, “Yeah, yeah, but you’re outliers,” sounds suspiciously like people who say the same shit about any other minority group.

We’re all part of this, dude.  You can’t just shunt aside those silly noisy outliers and tell them it’s not about them, because it is - otherwise you wouldn’t be implying that physically disabled people are too rare to actually address or that learning disabled kids are stupid.  Example:

My teacher never took me aside and told me he wanted to see and
read a draft of a paper before I handed it to him. Why? I seemed to function
fine on my own.

Pardon me for not “functioning fine on my own” and cluttering your classes.  I’ll just excuse myself and pretend that I’m stupid so that you feel better.

If you become a teacher and are not prepared to deal with the fact that your students are individuals, please, please, for the love of all that’s holy, find another line of work, is all I have to say about it.

The best I can come up with is that everyone wants to feel “included” in various ideas and initiatives.  I guess I’m more the sort of person who decides to make an exception where needed rather than trying to design an entire idea and policy around the possible corner cases.

No, asshole.  We need to be included in the core idea and policy and design because when we are not we are left out entirely.  The building I work in is nominally compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.  Except I look at it from the perspective of someone who’s probably going to be in a wheelchair and note that when I find myself in one I won’t be able to open the goddamned bathroom door without calling for help.  If there were powered doors with properly placed controls, I’d be fine.  Since there aren’t, what’s your solution for me?  Diapers?

Pardon me for not “functioning fine on my own” and cluttering your classes.

Actually, because I functioned fine on my own, my teacher was able to devote more time to doing the writing-workshop type work with the students who needed more attention. I can’t help but get the impression that you and Essie are advocating for “one size fits all” ideas specifically designed to accommodate LD students, while I’d simply advocate dealing with students who need more help differently. I was a decent enough writer that I could start writing a paper due every two weeks 2-3 days before the deadline and do fine. If you’re not as good as a writer, you need more attention from the teacher and need to have him go over your drafts if you wanted to get it up to standard. Essie, you seem to argue that this isn’t fair that some students will need to do more work than other students to come up to the same standard. Well, look, I wish I was a math genius, because then I wouldn’t have had to spend all that extra time understanding calculus while more “privleged” students caught on more quickly.

We need to be included in the core idea and policy and design because when we are not we are left out entirely.

Oh? In a fire emergency, the policy is to use the stairs to evacuate. Some people can’t use stairs, and we develop policies to accommodate them in order to evacuate them quickly.

If a teacher expects a child to fail, they will fail.

I think the point my teacher was making is that he expected that all of us would be able to turn in a paper without a sentence fragment, not that he was setting us up to fail. As I said, you seem to view these things as punishment, we seemed to view them as expectations that could be met, some needing more work to meet those expectations than others.

To me, the most amusing thing about this is that we are arguing special classes for LDs in order to preserve the sanctity of a policy of automatic failing grades on papers with minor mistakes. (Yes, a fragment is a minor mistake. I have an English degree from an accredited four-year school, blah, blah, blah, and I’m pulling rank on this. It IS a mistake, yes, it should NOT be in papers, no, but it IS minor and does not deserve an automatic F.)

That’s the havoc LDs wreak upon the Norms of society: Reasonable, wholistic grading policies.

Man, I miss the days when “catering to the LDs” meant wheelchair access for every broom closet and equally horrifically expensive OMGs boogeymen. Now we’re just a threat to Grammar Nazis. Ah, how the mighty have fallen.

I can’t help but get the impression that you and Essie are advocating for “one size fits all” ideas specifically designed to accommodate LD students

Amusingly, no, we haven’t gotten that far.

We’re arguing that an automatic F for a minor grammar mistake is a draconian policy with NO benefit for “norms” and a HUGE detriment to LDs. We’ve yet to hash out a policy that’s *not* detrimental to both.

Really, it seems like your only argument in *favor* of this policy is that it made you feel like a smart snowflake. Because I’ve yet to hear anything else good come from this, except possibly Gracchus’ unverifiable claims of greater rigor (unverifiable because it’s possible - yea, likely - he would have developed that rigor anyway).

Well, look, I wish I was a math genius, because then I wouldn’t have had to spend all that extra time understanding calculus while more “privleged” students caught on more quickly.

Ah, yes. “Privilege” is a question of inherent leet math skills, not being born with the right set of parents, the right money, the right language, the right color, the right accent, the right doctors (to get you diagnosed early if you do have LD), and the right neighborhoods.

Tyro, you can’t seem to write a post that doesn’t make me think you’re so dripping with privilege you don’t even know what it MEANS.

As I said, you seem to view these things as punishment

Tyro, do you *not* view an F grade as a punishment?

Oh? In a fire emergency, the policy is to use the stairs to evacuate. Some people can’t use stairs, and we develop policies to accommodate them in order to evacuate them quickly.

Yes.  There are.  They involve the disabled person being carried by the temporarily able-bodied.

Though since you suck at reading I will repeat myself.  I was not talking about emergency procedures designed for rare events.  I was talking about being able to go to the fucking bathroom.  Something I do ten, fifteen, twenty times a day.  If our society feels that I should work—and given that it’s impossible for me to get disability assistance payments I kind of assume it does—then it should make it possible for me to work.  A ‘walkable’ neighborhood can and should be designed so that most of it is accessible to people with mobility problems so we don’t have to be shut-ins because we can’t move through the world we weren’t involved in the design of.  What the fuck is your problem that you can’t see why that’s a good thing?

Oh look I’m angry and using salty language.  Do feel free to ignore the above, Tyro.  Because as we all know, angry means I’m stupid.

If there were powered doors with properly placed controls, I’d be fine.  Since there aren’t, what’s your solution for <strike>me</strike>and incresing number of Americans in an aging population expected to work further and further into their later years?  Diapers?

FTFY!

yes, increasing and an

Gratitude, Ms Kate. 

Kaninchen and Ms. Kate just won the thread, I think.

A ‘walkable’ neighborhood can and should be designed so that most of it is accessible to people with mobility problems so we don’t have to be shut-ins because we can’t move through the world we weren’t involved in the design of.  What the fuck is your problem that you can’t see why that’s a good thing?

Oh look I’m angry and using salty language.  Do feel free to ignore the above, Tyro.  Because as we all know, angry means I’m stupid.

Well, no, you’re not stupid because you’re angry. You’re stupid because your brain synapses aren’t firing properly, as measured in the standard Tyros-per-nanosecond.

I can’t help but get the impression that you and Essie are advocating for “one size fits all” ideas specifically designed to accommodate LD students

Use the right “its” or you fail is a one-size fits all policy, is it not?

Personally, I have trouble with this very “rule” for the simple reason that it conflicts with other “rules” in an illogical and confusing way that prevents me from properly rederiving it.  But I get paid six figures for the work I do, and that is in no small measure due to my exceptional and award-winning writing abilities, so what do I know?

I can’t help but get the impression that you and Essie are advocating for “one size fits all” ideas specifically designed to accommodate LD students

Use the right “its” or you fail is a one-size fits all policy, is it not?

Ah, a good point (nicely done, Ms Kate!), but we have to consider that the “no fragment or you fail” one-size-fits-all policy is a policy that is designed to not accommodate the LD students, so that makes it an acceptable one-size-fits-all policy.

Personally, I have trouble with this very “rule” for the simple reason that it conflicts with other “rules” in an illogical and confusing way

Which is why it is a common mistake. When student use “it’s” for “its”, it is usualy because they are using “it’s” as a possessive instead of the correct “its”. Since students are also trained to associate the apostrophe with the possessive, it is an easy mistake to make - something that veteran writers do.

I have no problem with a teacher taking off points for the mistake, why would I? But an automatic failure? That’s draconian and <u>of no benefit</u> to students. Even if it DIDN’T hurt LDs, I would still say it’s a bad policy because it is a policy that is not beneficial.

And, frankly, it’s pretty random. Did the teacher also fail papers for an incorrect “her’s”? Doubtful, because it’s the “it’s” that gets under the skin. Although, really, for a “her’s”, they probably just took the student out and shot them…

Wow, getting up and reading the morning additions to this thread…It feels like that I’m a helluva lot like INTPagan.  But then the internet is great at bringing us quirky folks together. 

We have a really crappy school system, don’t we? 

I think most school systems eventually evolve into disfunction as more and more people anticipate the mirage of expectactions rather than the results.  Eventually, we get the trained seals like Tyro who fit in the system so well that he hasn’t really made enough mistakes to sufficiently calibrate reality under a wide variety of circumstances.  That same system simply disserves everyone else because they don’t look, act, or have the background of the seals.  Just about all systems of education devolve into training the good inputs and dumping everyone else.  It has always been interesting to compare the Franco-German system with Singapore’s system with the US.  In Western Europe, they cull and caste.  In Singapore, they grind kids to dust and polish.  Here, we preselect successful people and warehouse everyone else.  All three systems are very much like one another, but there are some differences in emphasis.  Europe has a labor history, Singapore, like all E. Asian countries, uses educational meritocracy to mediate class conflict, and the US has a race history.

I’m thinking about this kind of stuff because there really are periods where a teacher *should* be perfectionist and motivate kids by whatever means possible.  It makes life easier and safer for all concerned down the road.  However, due to our own very American pathologies, it can be very hard to ensure that people with learning disabilities or other problems aren’t ground out like Gomer Pyle.  I’ve read quite a bit about how teachers and students cope with learning disabilities.  The biggest problems comes from the fact that the system doesn’t really *want* successful learning disabled people (outside of people like George W Bush, who most certainly got this treatment *anyways*) much in the same way that the system doesn’t really want successful minorities.  There is only a tolerance for those that succeed despite it all.  No real analysis on pedagogy for the disabled kid happens, but plenty of effort to make the test *outcomes* match the normal kids and pass the problems down the road.

Actually, because I functioned fine on my own, my teacher was able to
devote more time to doing the writing-workshop type work with the students
who needed more attention.

Thank you, Tyro, for being magnamimous enough to be brilliant so that your teachers had time for stupid kids like me.

By the by, incidentally, at least in my case, as well as the cases of other ADHD people I know at least, we didn’t “need more attention”.  We needed acknowledgement and, oftentimes, medication.  A teacher could sit down with me for an hour, and if my brain isn’t going to retain the information, it’s not going to retain the information.  A writing workshop isn’t going to help kids whose brains scramble letters or kids whose brains can’t focus on a pinpoint of information at will. 

The fact that you see those as correlated shows a very fundamental misunderstanding of the way learning disabilities act - they are not all the same damn thing.  A lot of them are chemical or structural, and spending hours with someone isn’t going to do a damn thing about unbalanced chemicals or structural anomalies in someone’s head.  If they’re not (I’m not sure of the causes of, say, dyslexia or dyscalculia), sometimes drilling that hard will work, and sometimes it won’t.  You can’t just say, “Okay, here’s a one-size-fits-all solution for kids with learning disabilities,” because my learning disability manifests differently from Essie’s, which manifests differently from Ms. Kate’s, which manifests differently from shah8, so on and so on.  Seriously, take off the damn privilege blinders.  We’re not asking you to restructure the whole educational system (not that that’s a bad idea, frankly).  We’re asking you to acknowledge that there are millions of people with hundreds of different kinds of learning disabilities that manifest in thousands of ways, and those millions of people all have varying degrees of varying kinds of intelligence (my mom, for example, isn’t near as academically smart as me, but damn, does she have intuition out the ass, and that is more valuable to me than the spelling bees I won as a kid).  Fuck’s sake; it’s not hard to process if you just think about it for a second.

The browser I’m in (at my parents’ place) right now is attaching stupid links to various words in my post; I apologize - they’re ads, I didn’t embed them, and please ignore them if they show up (they are in previews).

Eventually, we get the trained seals like Tyro who fit in the system so well that he hasn’t really made enough mistakes to sufficiently calibrate reality under a wide variety of circumstances.

Charming. I wasn’t always responsible. Think I never failed a paper? Well, I did, because I didn’t know what was expected of me. But I’m one of those people for whom high expectations work for. There are certain pedagogical methods that simply work for certain groups of people. I’d probably do well under the Singapore system or certian Jesuit high schools (grind and polish). But I’m more comfortable with offering that to those who thrive under that sort of high-expectations meritocracy rather than getting offended about its use because there are some people it doesn’t work for. But once again, we construct a system that works and create work-arounds for the corner cases.

We encourage walkable neighborhoods and design systems around walking and make them accessible for people who need to drive or can’t walk. But as it is, anytime we say, “people should be encouraged to walk as opposed to drive as a general rule” we have certain people who simply don’t understand that we can still accommodate exceptions while forming a general rule that works for most everyone.

Tyro, do you *not* view an F grade as a punishment?

I think I viewed the rule more as a standard. I think it’s clear we come at this from different angles. I construct rules and policies that work in general, and then find ways to accommodate the special cases. I even outlined the alternatives: since the grade is given for the final paper, turn in a draft earlier and find the mistakes before the final deadline. For the students that can’t meet the standards, give them more of a writing-workshop form of teaching (which they should have had by the time they get to that point). Instead, Essie, all we get from you is, “well what about? what about? what about?” Teachers are capable of handling corner cases while still maintaining their “rules.” The rule wasn’t “I don’t ever want to see a sentence fragment.” It was “Your final paper which you had two weeks to do and check over and show me shouldn’t have a sentence fragment.” Maybe there are some classrooms for which this is simply impossible to do (if he had lots of students that constantly and constantly
failed their papers, I would assume he would have stopped. As it was, we were able to deal.)
School works best for people who are fed and have a quiet place to do homework. Now, not everyone has this. My solution would be to find ways to make sure these students have these things rather than change the entire curriculum and way of teaching to serve those who don’t have those things.

I get it.

Tyro’s an STJ.  (You can follow through to ESTJ somewhere in this link, too, I’m sure, since I don’t know about E/I.

That’s why it’s like talking to a wall.  We’re talking from completely different viewpoints, and SJs tend to be more rigid on the whole (it’s not always a bad thing, but in this case it is).  We’re dealing with a rigid inability to view things as working from outside an established framework that he believes to be optimal since it worked for him.  And we can keep on yelling at his head about it and it won’t work.  Still, I have enough spare time for exercises in futility, so whatever.  Maybe someone else will actually notice that the way our system works is balls for anyone who varies even a little from the norm (especially in ways that are difficult to detect because of masking).

By the by, a “standard” can be a punishment.  You can spank a child every time they wet themselves as part of potty-training as a way of expressing your expectation that they use the toilet, and it is both a standard method of addressing the problem and a punishment.  Failing a paper every time would work the same way.

We needed acknowledgement and, oftentimes, medication.

Well, is the solution to give treatment to the needed students or simply change the curriculum and grading to deal with students who may or may not have certain needs? My argument would be to create systems that work for most people and then give special attention, treatment, and accommodations to the rest. There are a million ways to accommodate the needs of some students while ending up at the same destination.

You can’t just say, “Okay, here’s a one-size-fits-all solution for kids with learning disabilities,”

I’m not saying that. I’m saying that it’s perfectly reasonable to set a certain fixed set of standards that works well pedagogically and then address the exceptions, rather than saying that a system that works very well in general should be scrapped or is considered inherently harmful because there are certain people who require extra attention for.

I guess it comes down to whether you trust the teacher or not. My teacher had a rule which he used basically as a means of enforcing a “read your own work before you hand it in,” and we were able to follow it. Now, the brilliant thing here is that if a student clearly wasn’t able to follow this under normal circumstances, it was a red flag that something was wrong. The lazy but capable students had an incentive to actually work harder, and the students for whom the system didn’t work were immediately flagged (no one wants to fail). Essie seems to assume the worst and think that the teacher just wanted an excuse to fail people. I, on the other hand, figured it wasn’t that he wanted people to fail, it’s that he wanted people to hand in work that passed a threshold. What can I say? It worked for us. If my teacher had to deal with a lot of dyslexic students, then maybe it would have been different—but then he’d be teaching basically two spearate English classes: one that had certain demands and
expectations, and other that had a completely different set of demands and expectations. But under the circumstances under which he taught, nothing he demanded was considered impossible to handle. Maybe for some people it was, but we wouldn’t have found ourselves in his class in the first place if we had serious problems with writing: we were supposed to have gotten over that hump. In Gracchus’s case, anyone who couldn’t follow the “30 rules” was clearly a person flagged for attention in the 7th grade. Some people need to fail as an incentive to pick themselves up, but for some people that doesn’t work. One way to figure out which is which is to set a standard, see who cannot under any circumstances meet it, and then figure out how to accommodate that. And I don’t think that strategy is unreasonable.

Of course they did, because they had to work at it and were extra-conscious of the impression they were making.  Not to mention that the TOEFL test, which is pretty frigging rigorous from what I hear, is a requirement for entry into most U.S. colleges.

DonnaDiva,

Though your point about having to work at it and being extra-conscious of their presented impression is well taken, the “foreign looking” Profs never had to take the TOEFL test because they were JUST AS US-BORN AND RAISED as those socio-economically privileged mostly White Ivy/Ivy-level student complainers I was talking about.  If they didn’t have “foreign looking” features(read: non-White), these students would not have even brought up the “foreign accent” issue in the first place. 

As someone who is looking to enter academia and is “foreign looking” despite having been US-born and raised, this is an issue that has affected me as a student, academic tutor, and aspiring academic.

Asking/demanding clarification - well, you didn’t read where we DID ask, as a class, for clarification on a single question, and were given a hearty “fuck off”. And, believe me, tactfully or not, these profs were aware of the situation and ddn’t care - some of them actually seemed to enjoy it, like the one who decided to lecture on the “Wizard of Oz” in my “Electronics 1” class on the grounds that only a handle of us would catch on.

Essie,

The impression I am getting is that the core issue you had is that the Profs you had were tenured assholes who delighted in tormenting their students and going off on tangents….traits not limited to those with “foreign accents”. 

Your case is far more similar to the Profs my friends had at their Ivy/Ivy-level universities where Profs discussed completely irrelevant topics about their personal life like an Electrical Engineering Prof spending the whole semester discussing his township election campaign, a Politics Prof at another institution spending so much time talking about how wonderful the university he was teaching at was that the topic he was supposed to be covering that day was completely ignored, and the disturbingly common tendency of many Profs…especially high-ranking Profs well known for research in their respective fields literally running out of the lecture hall as soon as each of their classes ended to avoid dealing with undergrad questions and telling them to bring them all to their TFs/TAs.  Those very same Profs avoided/never posted their office hours on their syllabi and that tracking them down can often be just as involved as involved as an investigation into Madoff’s convoluted investment scams. 

Incidentally, this was one reason why I was glad to have attended my small private liberal arts college where such assholish behaviors would have never been tolerated as good teaching was a critical part of gaining a tenure track position/becoming tenured there. 

From what I’ve heard from Profs/TAs, friends who attended large universities…especially those of the Ivy/Ivy-level variety, and my own experiences from sitting in/taking classes at such places…..the main priority in gaining and keeping a position at the large universities seems to be the quantity and quality of your research output in the form of published books and journal articles along with the amount of grant money you can attract.  Despite all these universities’ lip service about caring about great teaching….it is of extreme low priority in practice so long as the Prof/TA in question is doing good research and/or is favored by the PTB in the department/University.

Because all of the Profs were “non-foreign looking”(read White), however, their students never used the “strong foreign accent” as THE BASIS of their complaints….even such complaints could have had some plausibility as I observed firsthand with a few Western European Profs with strong accents of the German, Swiss-German, Scottish, and Dutch varieties. 

I also find it interesting that you are arguing against “zero tolerance” policies teachers use to fail students for one grammatical mistake while making supportive arguments for those who are intolerant of Profs/TAs or anyone who has a strong foreign accent because some of them happen to be assholes. 

Not only is this reasoning flawed, but such intolerance for “strong foreign accents” displays IMO a remarkable degree of the very insularity characteristic of many Americans of the Buchanan ilk. 

Moreover, this intolerance over “strong accents” seems to be a very Western/US phenomenon as I’ve never seen these types of complaints of US/Westerners who teach or study in Chinese Universities from the student body.  Most Chinese undergrads IME display far more understanding, maturity, and tact towards their US/Western counterparts.  If anything, they sometimes bend over backwards by complementing a US/Westerner on their “excellent” Mandarin skills out of politeness and tact, especially if they happen to be White when objectively….their accent and diction is often so flawed that native Mandarin speakers could easily be confused about what that US/Westerner was actually intending to express.

Wonder how much of all this is a legacy of Western imperialism in the non-Western world…

Hm. I think I have figured it out a bit—my school was worried that the students were bright but lazy. So if you set up a set of incentives, they are forced to overcome their laziness. It worked for us, but I think that Essie’s issue is that she sees something inherently wrong with this.

As I said, I guess my mindset is generally, “go with something that works well, and if there’s an exception, cross that bridge where you come to it.” Lots of other people want an overarching model that is going to accommodate all the possible cases and exceptions. Which is reasonable when writing secure software systems but not morally wrong as a pedagogical teaching method.

The impression I am getting is that the core issue you had is that the Profs you had were tenured assholes who delighted in tormenting their students and going off on tangents….traits not limited to those with “foreign accents”.

Oh, absolutely. I was just wanting to point out that, while racist people DO complain about ‘accents’, not *everyone* who complains about accents is racist.

I also find it interesting that you are arguing against “zero tolerance” policies teachers use to fail students for one grammatical mistake while making supportive arguments for those who are intolerant of Profs/TAs or anyone who has a strong foreign accent because some of them happen to be assholes.

Well, I really don’t see a connection, I’m sorry. I do feel that a professor should be able to communicate effectively in the country in which they plan to teach. Now, you didn’t know my professors, so you can say “well, you just weren’t trying hard enough,” or whatever, but that just hasn’t been my experience.

The reason I hold teachers to a (higher) standard is that Teaching is a job for which someone is paid to communicate to others. Being a student, on the other hand, is a situation in which one is *paying* to be taught to communicate. Zero tolerance policies do not facilitate that learning on the student’s part.

If there’s some other connection I’m missing, please elaborate.

Not only is this reasoning flawed, but such intolerance for “strong foreign accents” displays IMO a remarkable degree of the very insularity characteristic of many Americans of the Buchanan ilk.

That’s one way to look at it. Another way to see it is that I paid good money and did not receive the service in return. If I can’t understand my Electronics 1 teacher because he cannot communicate effectively, then I’m being ripped off. I don’t think that’s racist of me, nor isolationist, but you might disagree.

Wonder how much of all this is a legacy of Western imperialism in the non-Western world

I expect it’s more of a legacy of American capitalism and the fact that we want to receive the best service for our money.

Hm. I think I have figured it out a bit—my school was worried that the students were bright but lazy. So if you set up a set of incentives, they are forced to overcome their laziness. It worked for us, but I think that Essie’s issue is that she sees something inherently wrong with this.

Well, um, yeah, I do. I have a problem with an educational model that starts with the assumption that there is something wrong/bad/evil about the students and that the teachers must assume an adversarial position to overcome that wrong/bad/evilness. I’ve said just that already, but thanks for confirming my suspicions.

I guess my mindset is generally, “go with something that works well, and if there’s an exception, cross that bridge where you come to it.”

The problem is, you are not in a position to say whether this policy “worked well” for anyone but yourself. The OTHER problem is, you seem totally okay with that - with finding a situation that works well for you, and everyone else be damned.

So if you set up a set of incentives, they are forced to overcome their laziness.

By the way, and I can’t believe I have to explain something so obvious, but “don’t make a mistake or you fail” is not an incentive. An incentive would be “don’t make a mistake and you receive an A”.

You have breezed right by Ms Kate’s point that YOUR policy is just as much a “one size fits all” as what you accuse me and INTPagan of advocating, by the way.

Hm. I think I have figured it out a bit—my school was worried that the students were bright but lazy.

How convenient.  I was actually a trained seal like you, didn’t even need to be assigned passages in Strunk and White, etc.  But I also know that pedants are not good teachers.  Period.  They can always very conveniently find something wrong with people they don’t like.  Or all boys who are good at math, or all girls who dare think they are smart, etc.

Instead of arguing with us, you should count your blessings that you never seem to have had a bully for a teacher who categorically made life hell for certain students who dared challenge the white male privilege by excelling at school.

Oops.  I’d written more but it has vanished into the ether.  Oh well.  So here’s the end:

It was “Your final paper which you had two weeks to do and check over and show me shouldn’t have a sentence fragment.”

This is you, Tyro, at 3:21 on 06/04: “And I remember how one of my English teachers in high school would give an automatic “F” on any paper he encountered with a sentence fragment, because it was taken to be a sign that you didn’t proofread it before handing it in.”

Not ‘your final paper.’  Any paper he encountered with a sentence fragment.

School works best for people who are fed and have a quiet place to do homework.

No.  School works best for people who conform to the values that school promotes.  Adequate food and a quiet place to do homework are necessary but not sufficient.  I had adequate food.  I had a quiet place to do homework.  I had a family that valued education and encouraged me to do homework.

School failed for me nonetheless, because school values conformity.  As a person with an autism spectrum disorder I am by definition unconforming.  I learned very quickly that many places, the best I could ever hope for was to keep the bullying to a minimum by accepting that I could not look to the school authorities for help because not only would they not help me, the bullies would escalate their efforts to abuse me.

Now, not everyone has this.

What a generous concession.  You are too kind.

My solution would be to find ways to make sure these students have these things rather than change the entire curriculum and way of teaching to serve those who don’t have those things.

Your solution fails thousands of children daily.  A curriculum and a pedagogy that does not include disadvantaged children at its center will inevitably fail them.  A cynical person might think that the school system as it exists works exceedingly well for the privileged and for those fortunate to succeed in spite of it.  After all, those it fails will be little enough competition for college admissions and high-paying jobs.  That the structure of our economy and our society depends on the school system failing these children.

Oh wait I am a bitter cynical woman.  And you, Tyro, are a blindingly privileged tool of oppression.

While we’re on the subject of oppression: For the third time, Tyro, do you think a system that required you to wear a diaper and piss yourself because ensuring you had access to the fucking toilet never entered into the builders’ minds is a success?  That it would be fundamentally sound?  Ethical and fair to all?

You keep not answering this question.  In fact, you continue to ignore that it exists.  The closest you came to a response was to say that there were emergency protocols designed to keep people who could not navigate stairs from dying in fires.  That’s great when there’s a fire.  What do we do when our bladders are full?

Those of us with disadvantages and disabilities keep telling you that a system that does not include us at the core nearly always fails to consider us at all.  You keep not hearing it.

At this stage I’m not even interested in winning the thread or the internet or anything.  Right now it’s about expressing my contempt for you, Tyro.  Are you getting that at all?  Is that penetrating that oh-so-comfy armor of your privilege?

Here’s another one to consider, Tyro ...

My older son started school in a three-floor walkup nearly a century old.  It didn’t even have water fountains!  Kids who broke their legs, like kids will, or suffered other mobility impairments had to be home-tutored because they couldn’t get into the school (even the first floor was up a flight of stairs, the basement down a flight).

Two years in, when my younger son started school, the “new schools” were finally ready.  They were accessible, fully so, with elevators.

In fourth grade, my older son broke his foot.  He went to class as usual.

In third grade, my younger son had a bike wreck where he speared his thigh with the lever of his bike brake handle.  Punctured it down to the bone. 

After two days recovery, he went to school as usual, on crutches.

Both boys were in top floor rooms at the time - 4th floor.  Both would have required tutoring if Tyro was the architect and declared this “corner issue”, despite the fact that it is not - there are a couple of kids EACH DAY in this school who have to ride the elevator for other than permanent reasons.  A couple of kids EACH DAY who would have to be tutored at home.

That doesn’t even get to the teachers who have had much shorter leaves of absence because they can use a scooter or use crutches and get back to work.  It doesn’t figure in that the custodial staffs have had far fewer injuries and far less sick time and worker’s comp time because they can move equipment, supplies, and furniture around much more easily.  It doesn’t even cover the parent involvement that came with having elevators and ramps - that certain parents who are home when homework gets done because they are on disability could now attend conferences and meet with teachers to discuss that homework.

See how limited your puny worldview is, Tyro?  I feel sorry for you.

BTW, the middle school, also newly built, had a Junior Honor Society induction the other night.  Two of my son’s classmates in 7th grade used mobility assist devices to get to the stage and take their certificates like everybody else.  These kids were not able to even attend school until the 2nd grade.

If you always had schools that excluded these kids, you might think it a fringe issue.

The reason I hold teachers to a (higher) standard is that Teaching is a job for which someone is paid to communicate to others. Being a student, on the other hand, is a situation in which one is *paying* to be taught to communicate. Zero tolerance policies do not facilitate that learning on the student’s part.

That’s one way to look at it. Another way to see it is that I paid good money and did not receive the service in return.

Essie,

These two quotes shed light on where our disagreement lies. 

I’m sorry, but I strongly disagree with the teacher/Prof/TA as service provider and student as consumer mindset you seem to have. 

This very mentality is one of the reasons why so many Profs, TAs, and fellow undergrad classmates/friends complain about undergrads who complain or more often these days…have their parents complain about receiving a B or lower grade and demand an A-level grade mainly “because I’m paying tuition so I deserve a degree with an A-level transcript” regardless of the fact their academic work and effort was such that it merited that B or lower grade.  This mentality IME also tends to effectively absolve the student’s of any responsibility for his/her own education…...a mentality which can be quite detrimental to one’s educational process from what I’ve observed at many college campuses where the “I(99/100 Mommy & Daddy) pay tuition therefore I deserve my degree with little/no effort on my part” mentality seems to be quite prevalent from my observations…especially among the socio-economically privileged undergrads. 

Education is not a service whose quality can solely or even mostly determined by the teacher/Prof/TA.  Education is a collaborative process where a positive outcome is just as much, if not more a product of a student’s own work, thinking, and effort as that of the teacher/Prof/TA.  No matter how hard they try, if the student is not willing to put in the work, thinking, and effort into his/her education process, it will usually come to naught from observing undergrads both at my undergrad and at the Ivy/Ivy-level undergrad/grad classes I’ve sat in as a guest of friends who were students at those places.  This very nature of the educational process is one key reason why education as a consumer-oriented service doesn’t work…..it completely leaves out the student’s own responsibility to exert serious efforts toward furthering his/her own educational process. 

Teachers can be great facilitators and motivators, but ultimately, teachers and especially Profs & TAs cannot and should not be doing the student’s own necessary legwork for him/her.  It is not only not their job….but also undermines the educational process as a large chunk of it is determined by the student’s own work, thinking, and efforts.

As for foreign teachers/Profs/TAs having strong accents, their mere presence should be viewed as an educational opportunity for American undergrads as being able to bridge and overcome this issue is a critical life skill as we won’t always have the luxury of only interacting with people who are native speakers of US English. 

This is especially so with the increasing diversification of our own society and the increasing international collaboration in many areas of our lives.  IMHO….better to learn how to handle this issue while you’re in college rather than wait until you get into grad school, the working world, or dealing with it in the course of one’s post-college life. 

Do we really want our college graduates to go through 4 years of college without ever having to learn how to deal with colleagues and supervisors with strong foreign accents….or other communication impediments which have nothing to do with them for that matter?

If yes, .....that answer is most probably one Buchanan and his ilk would give if this question was posed to them.

Nice philosophy, Exholt.  How about some real world now?  You sound like a wingnut with your theories of shoulds and should nots and so on.

Explain why a student shouldn’t consider that a teacher is NOT doing their job and a TA is NOT doing their job when those people do NOT keep to their stated office hours - ever?  Furthermore, since when is abusive behavior by a teacher exempt from restriction?  Such as when a teacher says “it’s your fault you don’t learn anything because you are a stupid (insert gender, race, etc.) rather than addressing the issue of the teaching system not following through on office hours?

I don’t know the exact particulars of what really happened with Essie - I just know that it resonates with the experiences that many people I know have had with the system.  Blaming the student for “not wanting to learrrrrnnnnnnnnn” doesn’t cut it when the instructors are derelict or abusive or just plain flat out lazy.

Oh, and Exholt?  there is some research about foreign TAs and profs and accents that is interesting ... HOWEVER, when you have a TA who doesn’t even know how to ask where the men’s room is in English, there is a problem.

Yes.  You read that right.  I actually had a TA at MIT who could not speak English well enough to ask the way to the men’s room ... he drew a toilet on the board, and somebody took pity.  Then he read from class notes, but wasn’t particularly intelligible and was unable to take questions.

Blaming the student for “not wanting to learrrrrnnnnnnnnn” doesn’t cut it when the instructors are derelict or abusive or just plain flat out lazy.

I ran into this with Advanced Inorganic Chemistry.  Not a course that the highly privileged wealthy white students at SMU—who now and again tempted me to test the hypothesis that it was impossible to heave a brick on campus without hitting one—were clamouring to get into and skate through.  The gentleman teaching the class was very clearly using someone else’s ten-year-old lecture notes to teach from.  It seemed lazy to me.  I sort of resented it, though instead of complaining I just didn’t put much work into the class either.

There are, to be sure, bad students.  There are bad professors and bad teaching assistants also.  My impression of Essie is that she was a good student faced with a bad teacher and an administration that didn’t want to be bothered with it.

I had a bigger problem with professors using archaic methods and symbols that I couldn’t look up in the library—a nightmare when it’s physical chemistry!  I have had plenty of foreign teachers and not one has ever been unintelligable—even though I use hearing aids!  The ones with the thicker accents were always concerned about being understood.  I think it’s because I went to smaller places, like Exholt, where faculty couldn’t really get away with being unintelligable speech because it’s like a small town where everyone gossips and losing face is appreciable for a deficiency.

Also, some people can’t speak a second language so good under stress/anxiety issues.  Just because that TA couldn’t say “Where’s the Bathroom?” doesn’t mean he couldn’t.  He couldn’t right then.

Exholt, I think there’s a world of difference between I’m paying for education so I should receive an automatic A and I’m paying for education so I should receive a teacher with whom communication is possible. If you don’t see a difference between those two, god help you because I sure as hell can’t.

As for foreign teachers/Profs/TAs having strong accents, their mere presence should be viewed as an educational opportunity for American undergrads as being able to bridge and overcome this issue is a critical life skill as we won’t always have the luxury of only interacting with people who are native speakers of US English.

Um, ok, Pollyanna. Over here in reality-land, I’ve had to overcome a good deal of problems because my Electrical Engineering schooling was *incredibly* spotty and has massive amount of gaps that no amount of self-training and outside tutoring (both of which I’ve explored immensely and remember that as a home schooler I’m no stranger to self-study) has been able to overcome.

I am, in fact, extremely lucky that I fell into a software job where they understood that what I was expected to do was outside my major and were willing to train me. If I’d gone into the career field I theoretically *should* have pursued, I’d be hosed. And I’d be lying if I said that the fact that I paid for an education and received crap-on-a-stick in return hasn’t damaged my earning potential, because it has.

I would also like to point out that over here in The Real World, not all teachers want a bridge of communication and rainbows to be built. You kind of breezed past my point where the profs with strong accents had been in the country for over a decade and genuinely did not care that their students couldn’t understand them. Yes, they were assholes, and profs who speak perfect English can also be assholes. But that doesn’t make it right, nor does it make my complaint invalid. What it *does* do is demolish your little “build a bridge of love” theory that we’ll all come out of school enriched and multi-culturally sensitive because if one side is using “multi-culturalism” as a free ticket to get their jollies, abuse students, and avoid the work they disliked (these profs made no secret that they were only teaching because it was a requirement to have access to the uni labs) then, no, we don’t come to a greater understanding. We just get abused.

So, in other words, I think you’re full of shit. And I mean that in a very polite way.

Nice philosophy, Exholt.  How about some real world now?  You sound like a wingnut with your theories of shoulds and should nots and so on.

Ms Kate, I’ve enjoyed immensely being on your side of an argument for a change. We should do this again sometime. I’m serious.

I actually had a TA at MIT who could not speak English well enough to ask the way to the men’s room ... he drew a toilet on the board, and somebody took pity.

I didn’t go to MIT, and yet this story is all too familiar to me because this kind of thing happened too often in my own school. Kids were brought in as Teaching Assistants when, really, they were Reaserch Assistants (and damn good ones, too) and - as a result - the students suffered when we weren’t taught.

And, frankly, I don’t feel too good about sinking all that money into a multi-cultural experience when, really, I just wanted to learn electrical engineering.

Nice philosophy, Exholt.  How about some real world now?

Ms. Kate,

I am talking about the real world.  I’ve seen plenty of US-born colleagues go down crashing and burning in both the working world and in academia because they weren’t able to bridge the gap and overcome the problem with “strong foreign accents” which was almost always IME a dogwhistle for “What are these dirty foreign workers/colleagues/supervisors doing working with/supervising me?” Heard many more stories of this type from relatives and friends who have worked in teams with foreign colleagues in various work settings both within the US and abroad. 

Explain why a student shouldn’t consider that a teacher is NOT doing their job and a TA is NOT doing their job when those people do NOT keep to their stated office hours - ever?  Furthermore, since when is abusive behavior by a teacher exempt from restriction?

Show me where exactly I have said that?

I was disagreeing with Essie’s point that teachers/Profs/TAs should be held to a higher standard on the “strong foreign accents” issue.  While teachers/Profs/TAs and the school administration should do their best to do their part to bridge/overcome this issue, linguistically privileged US-born students also need to step up and realize that learning a second language is no cakewalk and that some understanding and maturity can go a long way towards ameliorating the issue.  The fact the vast majority of US-born Americans are comfortably monolingual should make this quite clear….

From seeing and hearing about how the dynamics of the “strong foreign accent” complaints from undergrads usually work….it is almost always applied towards foreign/“foreign looking” POC with racist overtones.  The fact I’ve seen this labeling frequently applied to US-born POC Ivy Profs merely because they are of non-White descent and thus “foreign looking” adds to my suspicions about the motives of undergrads who frame complains against Profs on the basis of “foreign accents”. 

Essie’s framing her problems with her foreign Profs as a “strong foreign accents issue” rather than an asshole tenured Prof issue…..an issue not restricted solely or even mostly to foreign Profs/TAs with strong accents struck me as wrong and reminiscent of wingnut language I commonly come across whenever the subject turns to “them damned foreigners(read: Non-White) and their strong accents”.

Though she most probably did not mean to, her framing of the symptoms as the core issue played right into many racist right-wing talking points I’ve came across regarding the perils of the influx of foreigners in academia and other professions requiring higher education.  And if you’re “foreign looking” despite being US-born and raised…..you’re still part of the problem as far as they are concerned. 

I actually had a TA at MIT who could not speak English well enough to ask the way to the men’s room ... he drew a toilet on the board, and somebody took pity.

Though there are a few cases like this, IME and those of friends who attended college at various campuses including your own is that the vast majority of complaints about Profs/TA’s “foreign accents” are often made by mostly socio-economically privileged mostly White students as a way to excuse their own mediocre performance while manifesting their overentitlement and racist tendencies…..and quite a bit of the time….the instructors were accused as such not because they necessarily had an accent…but because they “looked foreign” (read non-White)....including US-born POC.

Just because that TA couldn’t say “Where’s the Bathroom?” doesn’t mean he couldn’t.  He couldn’t right then.

Um, considering that Ms Kate went to school there and presumably saw the TA in question on more than that one single occassion, I’m willing to take her word that he didn’t know any English. I mean, is that so surprising and out of the question?

Or are you just going to assume that Ms Kate is just such a stupid/racist person, that she must have just *assumed* that he couldn’t speak English?. Geez, I may not always agree with Ms Kate, but give her some credit for not being a complete moron. I think she’s smart enough to relate the situation she observed accurately.

Essie’s framing her problems with her foreign Profs as a “strong foreign accents issue” rather than an asshole tenured Prof issue

With good reason. The abusive asshole profs who could speak English were still abusive asshole profs, but I was able to understand their lectures and glean a little bit of knowlege between the abuse and asshole behavior.

The ones who couldn’t speak English, I can’t say the same for.

And I maintain that it is not unreasonable to expect a lecturer (which is what a professor is) to be able to lecture in a manner than his/her intended audience will understand.

By the way, Exholt, would you like to address this point:

Exholt, I think there’s a world of difference between I’m paying for education so I should receive an automatic A and I’m paying for education so I should receive a teacher with whom communication is possible.

The ones with the thicker accents were always concerned about being understood.  I think it’s because I went to smaller places, like Exholt,

All of my experiences with undergrads complaining about “strong foreign accents” took place at larger Ivy/Ivy-level universities while I sat in on several dozen courses while visiting friends on breaks during college/after graduation and when I took a few courses at such institutions after college as a special student.  And while cases like Ms. Kate’s do exist….they were far rarer than the more common complaints about accents because some poor overprivileged US-born mostly White undergrads couldn’t handle getting a B or lower grade because s(he) skipped out on too many classes, chose to sleep through the lecture, came to class drunk, turned in slipshod work, and/or bombed the exams.

Look, Exholt, ever single one of your posts are long whines about “all your experiences” with people making these kinds of complaints turn out to be “racist dogwhistles”. And yet, you’ve yet to provide a compelling reaason for why lecturers shouldn’t be expected to communicate minimally with their intended audience, outside of a liberal rainbows-and-puppies-and-understanding cop-out that doesn’t address the actual point of higher education.

It’s pretty clear at this point, in fact, that you’ve decided that I and Ms Kate are racists because, if we weren’t, we’d focus on the fact that these profs were assholes and ignore the fact that their asshole behavior manifested in an unwillingness to learn the language… frankly, because attitudes like yours get them a blank check.

Would you like to respond to ANY of my or Ms Kate’s points, rather than just filibuster another “well, in my experience, every complaint about ‘strong accents’ was TOTES racist dogwhistle” post?

You know, Essie Elephant, you’re pinging my radar as much as you’re pinging Exholt‘s.

I mean, you more or less just said that I shouldn’t able to teach anyone because I don’t speak fully normally (tho’ much better than other deaf and hard of hearing people) and I mispronounce words often.  I might need help from the students when they need to ask me something about what I’ve said.

But then you say that I’d be too much of a “multicultural experience”.  Do you see where you might have gone a bit far?

And while cases like Ms. Kate’s do exist

How gracious of you to concede this. Will you also concede that this is unfair to the student who has paid tuition expecting to be educated in XYZ subject as opposed to a crash course in pantomime?

they were far rarer than the more common complaints about accents because some poor overprivileged US-born mostly White undergrads couldn’t handle getting a B or lower grade because s(he) skipped out on too many classes, chose to sleep through the lecture, came to class drunk, turned in slipshod work, and/or bombed the exams.

When all else fails, question the complainers motives. It’s not possible that they stopped coming to class because they couldn’t understand the lecturer.

Actually, I got the highest grade in my Electronics class because I stopped attending entirely in the last few weeks and just stayed home and self-taught myself as best I could. But I’m sure that if I’d complained, you would have just assumed I was staying home because I was a lazy student.

I mean, you more or less just said that I shouldn’t able to teach anyone because I don’t speak fully normally

I said I expect lecturers to be able to communicate minimally with their intended audience. I wouldn’t define the occassional mispronounced word as “not being able to communicate minimally”. Do you?

Also,

turned in slipshod work

happens when you can’t understand the lecturer.

bombed the exams

happens when the test questions don’t have verbs in them and make zero sense.

Once again, you’re seeing the symptom of a student having a communication problem with a teacher and just assuming that the student is flawed. I had these problems, in spades. But since I’m a white, privileged American, I’m sure that fits nicely with your prejudices - I’m just a whiny racist, unwilling to try to understand my profs. None of my co-students could understand then either, but since they were mostly white too, they were probably all racists as well.

But here’s the thing, what’s the line between sufficient and unsufficient?  It’s a major reason why this sort of thing is a classic dogwhistle.

BTW, it was your comment at 5:23 is the one I really had problems with.

And I maintain that it is not unreasonable to expect a lecturer (which is what a professor is) to be able to lecture in a manner than his/her intended audience will understand.

This is what you had a problem with? Can you elaborate on which part of it bothers you?

With good reason. The abusive asshole profs who could speak English were still abusive asshole profs, but I was able to understand their lectures and glean a little bit of knowlege between the abuse and asshole behavior.

The ones who couldn’t speak English, I can’t say the same for.

——-
An abusive professor will always be better than someone who *tries* to communicate?

assuming their qualifications are equal…

An abusive professor will always be better than someone who *tries* to communicate?

You are misunderstanding me. Exholt was saying that I am incorrectly diagnosing my problem as “strong accent” when I should REALLY harp on “asshole behavior” (because they were NOT trying to communicate and were being assholes about the issue).

I am saying that the English Speaking Assholes taught me more than the NON English Speaking Assholes, so the reason I had not harped on “asshole behavior” was because that wasn’t the sum of the problem - the not-being-able-to-speak-English is NOT a non-issue.

In both cases, BOTH professors are assholes. But I can at least understand one of them.

In your dichotomy between Understandable Asshole and Non-understandable NiceProf, I’d go for the Non-understandable NiceProf on the grounds that I would hope they would provide supplemental written instruction or something to cover the communication gap.

But, I would still feel I was not getting my money’s worth. I don’t know if that will offend you or not. I want a lecture who is not and asshole and who is understandable. I don’t think that’s unreasonable of me.

I’m not offended.

I’m glad. I genuinely am.

To answer your question before about your own communication, assuming that you were making an effort to communicate effectively, I would expect that your students are content. If you are a smart teacher and aware of the subject matter and you are aware of your difficulties and provide supplemental materials (written instructions, video lectures for people who need to have you repeat something, a communicative TA, whatever), then I think you’re a fine lecturer.

And, of course, if you aren’t a pedant who flunks people for the occassional honest mistake, that always helps.

Shorter Pat Buchanan:  We have standards here!  Those people are lazy and changing things to include them threatens our privileges.  Besides, we can’t let them in our club because that would lower our standards!

Shorter Tyro: We have standards here!  Those people are lazy and changing things to include them threatens our privileges.  Besides, we can’t let them in our club because that would lower our standards!

And, yes, the TA could not speak English.  He could grade papers and he could write in English, but could not understand nor speak it.  The lecturer took over the recitation sections.

You know, Essie Elephant, you’re pinging my radar as much as you’re pinging Exholt‘s.

I mean, you more or less just said that I shouldn’t able to teach anyone because I don’t speak fully normally (tho’ much better than other deaf and hard of hearing people) and I mispronounce words often.  I might need help from the students when they need to ask me something about what I’ve said.

But then you say that I’d be too much of a “multicultural experience”.  Do you see where you might have gone a bit far?

Exactly!! Both Essie and Ms. Kate seem to be blundering into using the very same talking points as the right-wing oriented “English First” crowd and those who fan fears of a “foreign” takeover in academia and other professions. 

I wonder why is it that US-born Americans and Westerners frequently feel entitled to harp about foreign/foreign looking Prof’s/TA’s with “strong accents” when it is almost never an issue with Americans/Westerners who are teaching classes abroad in places like China, Taiwan, and Japan from what I’ve heard from US-born non-Japanese friends who attended/taught at Japanese universities.  And from what I’ve seen while studying for an extended period in China….most of the Americans/Western Prof’s Mandarin abilities left much to be desired…...far worse than the worst accents I’ve heard from foreign Profs lecturing on many campuses or colleagues giving work presentations.

And yet…it is often the Americans/Westerners who feel entitled to throw temper tantrums abroad when they cannot find anyone who can speak English abroad.  It is as if the old colonialist expectation that all non-Westerners whether living in the US or abroad must cater to Americans/Westerners….whether in the US/Europe or abroad in the non-Westerner’s own country.  Saw far too many cringeworthy episodes during my extended stay in China of Americans/Westerners throwing temper tantrums when their language entitlement weren’t being immediately met. 

And, frankly, I don’t feel too good about sinking all that money into a multi-cultural experience when, really, I just wanted to learn electrical engineering.

Ahh….the old extreme narrow-minded anti-intellectualism common among many high school classmates and friends who ended up majoring in Engineering/CS fields…including some who attended and graduated from schools like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Caltech. 

And they wondered why no one was willing to hire them for 3+ years after the dotcom bust despite having pedigreed degrees and 3.6+ GPAs.

Okay, I stepped out of this one and caught back up.

Without taking anybody’s side, wouldn’t it be conceded amongst all posters here that if a TA or a Prof isn’t objectively doing their job (ie: non-comprehensible [whether due to language or accent or lecturing incompetence], doesn’t keep office hours, using RAs as TAs when they shouldn’t be doing so) then there is, within a university or college setting, Ivy League or no, almost NO way of holding them to account for this?

(Sorry for the run-on sentence in a de facto grammar geek thread.)

It’s pretty clear at this point, in fact, that you’ve decided that I and Ms Kate are racists because, if we weren’t, we’d focus on the fact that these profs were assholes and ignore the fact that their asshole behavior manifested in an unwillingness to learn the language… frankly, because attitudes like yours get them a blank check.

How can you really know that the reason those Profs/TAs “refused” to learn the language, is really necessarily because they were assholes.  How did you know they really “refused” and didn’t say/intimate that to avoid embarrassment and sometimes harassment from US-born undergrads? 

And yes, I and plenty of friends, colleagues, and relatives attending US universities from the 1950’s to the present have seen plenty of incidents where US-born undergrads did exactly that to TAs/Profs who happen to be foreign-born…whether to their face or behind their back through insidious rumormongering….especially before the 1990s.  BS like this was one reason why more multicultural curricular requirements and calls for more tolerance among US-born undergrads were put into place during the 1980s and 1990s. 

As someone who grew up in a bilingual household and who spent time during my undergrad and post-college years volunteering as an English language tutor for working-class immigrants and international/foreign students, learning a second language…especially once you’re past the age of 9-12 is no walk in the park for most people unless they happen to be naturally gifted polyglots. 

This is one reason why most people whose first exposure to a foreign language is taking 3-5 years of a college-level language course have a much harder time becoming fluent in said language than someone who grew up with it or started learning the language during early elementary school. 

Think about it….if you must relocate to a non-English speaking foreign country to advance in your profession where you were required to communicate extensively, would YOU be able to pick up that non-English language quickly and flawlessly as you expect foreign Profs/TAs/colleagues to do so?

From watching most Americans/Western university Profs attempting to use Mandarin after teaching for a decade or more in the US and in Mandarin speaking countries…..I wouldn’t be so sure…especially if they happen to be from older generations of US/Westerners when foreign language learning wasn’t given the same level of importance as it has been for the last 2 decades. 

Without taking anybody’s side, wouldn’t it be conceded amongst all posters here that if a TA or a Prof isn’t objectively doing their job (ie: non-comprehensible [whether due to language or accent or lecturing incompetence], doesn’t keep office hours, using RAs as TAs when they shouldn’t be doing so) then there is, within a university or college setting, Ivy League or no, almost NO way of holding them to account for this?

In the context of US-born undergrads’ complaints of “strong foreign accents”, this question is a bit of a red herring.

The vast majority of such cases from personal experience and talking with US-born and non-US-born Profs/TAs, high school classmates, friends, colleagues, and relatives who taught/attended US universities over the last 50 years is that in the vast majority of cases…the “foreign accent” in question was never really the issue….but a way for mediocre US-born undergrads with an excessive degree of entitlement to excuse their poor performance and express racially-motivated outrage that a foreign/“foreign looking” Prof/TA dared give them a lower than desired/failing grade when such people should be catering to/anticipating their every whim. 

This suspicion was furthered in their view as this complaint is almost always disproportionally used against those who “look foreign”(non-White) despite the sizable presence of Western European and US-born Profs with strong foreign or regional accents at most of those institutions.

Interesting discussion at crooked timber…
http://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/03/low-performing-high-performing-schools/#more-11390

A fact that has not been sufficiently addressed is that Sotomayor went to Princeton when Princeton had BARELY gone co-ed.  The first female students at Princeton were in the incoming class in 1969, i.e. the class of 1973.  Sotomayor graduated in 1976.  So I guess she is the sort of idiot who crushes her competition, many of whom probably were incapable of dealing with a stellar “wise Latina” student if my experiences as a member of the Class of 1991 were any guide.  Unfortunately, since my own performance at Princeton was a lot less impressive, but I didn’t re-read my earlier literary canon, Buchanan would probably think I am smart.

Princeton awards academic honors by department, so she was the top or perhaps tied for top student in her department; I don’t know what major she had.  She was an editor at Yale Law School, generally well-regarded, and was an editor at the Yale Law Journal.

It’s mark of character that Sotomayor didn’t let the bigotries of assholes like Buchanan stop her from doing basic background reading for an Anglophone culture which to her was somewhat foreign.  If I went to study in Quebec in a Francophone university or in France, I would probably study some French children’s literature to pick up not only the allusions but also the turns of phrase, though I probably wouldn’t show Sotomayor’s discipline.

Ahh….the old extreme narrow-minded anti-intellectualism common among many high school classmates and friends who ended up majoring in Engineering/CS fields.

You got me - I’m a narrow minded engineer. I also, FYI, have a degree in English. How would you like to fit that data point into your stereotype of me?

How can you really know that the reason those Profs/TAs “refused” to learn the language, is really necessarily because they were assholes.  How did you know they really “refused” and didn’t say/intimate that to avoid embarrassment and sometimes harassment from US-born undergrads?

Well, I’m pretty sure I mentioned the prof who spent Electronics 1 talking about “The Wizard of Oz” because he knew half the class wouldn’t catch on to what he was actually saying. I tend to pigeon that as asshole behavior. I’m sure if he was white, you’d probably think so.

—-

Anyway, I really only came back to resurrect this thread because I was going through some old links today and I saw this: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2002/03/22/i-hate-your-politics/

Incredibly funny, witty, and worth reading. And you know what? There’s an accidental sentence fragment in it. If a student turned this in to me, I’d give it an A without question. Tyro, your Mr. Hobart would fail him for “not reading his own work”.

Just a quick point to prove that even really good, clever pieces can have fragments. And, yeah, it’s a blog post and not a formal paper, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less awesome.

You got me - I’m a narrow minded engineer. I also, FYI, have a degree in English. How would you like to fit that data point into your stereotype of me?

My comment on your narrow-mindedness is mainly derived from this comment:

And, frankly, I don’t feel too good about sinking all that money into a multi-cultural experience when, really, I just wanted to learn electrical engineering.

This attitude may have been more appropriate for US undergraduates during the US’ isolationist period of the 1920s-30s. 

It is seriously out of step with current times considering the greater degree of diversity in more sectors of US society and the increasing trend of international cross-collaboration and interdependence in many areas of our lives…..especially in academia and STEM professions such as Engineering/CS. 

Hope you’ve never had to deal with engineering/CS colleagues with less than perfect verbal English skills from non-English speaking countries as varied as Japan, South Korea, Iran, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Italy, Russia, China, etc as I have in my university and professional careers.  Yet despite that….most of my colleagues and I found that a little perspective and patience went a long way towards bridging and overcoming any communications problems so we can collaborate and complete our work on time while meeting/exceeding initial expectations.

I’ve never understood why “writing” or “grammar” are independant subjects.

Couldn’t you teach these concepts in the midst of learning everything else? I mean, for instance, about the importance of grammar during math (the whole a square is a rectangle is not the same as a rectangle is a square is all about syntax and specificity as much as it is geometry.)

I have always learned better when things are integrated together - when they stand on their own it is always awkward for me to understand them. For instance, I took algebra two times during junior high and failed. And then when I took chemistry during high school, it suddenly all made sense once they explained the whole equations must be equal on both sides because you don’t lose things concept, algebra literally clicked in my brain.

I went on to get a 34 in the math score of my sats. Not to brag, but to make a point that a kid who failed algebra TWICE was able to better at it than most people end up being once it was given a context. Seriously, our brains are designed to learn within context - because in the real world there are no discrete subjects. They all overlap, and intertwine, and effect each other. Syntax and grammar are at the root of EVERYTHING. If you can’t communicate effectively, you can’t teach and you can’t learn.