Sunday, September 16, 2012

This Will Come as No Surprise to Any English Teachers Reading This . . .

. . . and the headline writer really should say "fewer" in a headline like this.

Less than one in four American teens has proficient writing skills - even when allowed spell check and computers 

8 comments:

Bud said...

PROFICIENT writing skills? I would have thought the # would be ~10%, even with spell-check, etc..
And the answer is? Why, give more money to federal or local education administrations, of course! Teacher's "unions" and lousy teachers are easy targets and, no doubt, they certainly deserve being targets! However, even getting rid of poor teachers would be near the bottom of my list of corrective actions needed. My top "answer" would be: Have the same standards for passing courses as when I was in school 50 years ago. If most all "students" fail, then they fail. In other words, have high school degrees mean something.
Well, we all know that will never happen because, mainly, we don't have the collective will as a society to effectively deal with the "failures" (e.g. intensive, military-school like methodologies for dealing with "disruptors"; intensive, alternative training for non-academically talented students, ETC.) End rant.

Marsdon said...

I recently had a friend complete an online masters degree in education. I had to re-write many of her papers. She writes at about the 5th grade level!

Unknown said...

Sadly this is nothing new. When I was working on my Master's, a guy whose wife Judy knew flunked his thesis (psychology major) because it appeared to have been written by a fifth grader. I rewrote it for him, and he managed to get by. That was more than 45 years ago.

Deb said...

I've helped school administrators write papers and I was shocked at their inability to clearly express their thoughts (or even know what thought they were trying to express). These were people with advanced degrees and certifications. Recently our entire school system received a memo from a top administrator which was full of misspellings, bad grammar, and (my personal pet peeve) passive voice. I could only sigh. It's endemic now.

Unknown said...

Yep. One of my faculty members used to grade an occasional memo from the administration and return it. This did not endear her.

Deb said...

She must have had tenure!

Unknown said...

Yes, but she'd have done it anyway.

Cap'n Bob said...

My headline does say fewer.

Last week I was in the supermarket and noticed a sign for the express lane that said "15 ITEMS OR LESS." I'm thinking of writing to the CEO.