oh people, please

[threeplusfire]

From a review of 300:

"over all a great movie, if you havent seen it buy it, its worth it for action fans who love the mid-evil type era."

I had to pause for a moment to allow my brain to recover before I continued working.

Comments

[silentjack.livejournal.com]

For the past three years, I've been teaching what have ostensibly been English comp classes, despite their titles as music courses (and my more-extensive training in the latter). I admit that not everyone who goes through the hallowed (and increasingly hollowed) walls of a university will ultimately need to spout off Chicago-style footnotes or write for a scholarly audience, but the concept of improving written grammar and teaching people (when it should have been just a refresher) the finer points of the English language all became anathema to many students. I shouldn't have had to tell college folks about high-school (and earlier!) errors, and there were occasional fits of horror and immense patience from my end: for instance, when a student asked what a "source for a paper" was; when another student asked why it mattered if they confused "there/their/they're,"; and on. My biggest problem was spending so much time trying to erase awful writing habits and teaching basic things -- like structure and syntax! -- that I had to sacrifice (repeatedly) course content. And, thanks in large part to NCLB/ESEA2, I have seen the writing and academic quality of students, just over these past three years, plummet. I felt I was going to be lucky last semester if I had one term paper that didn't have blatant grammatical or functional errors: and, lo and behold, I had only one paper (out of 50) that was devoid of all of the most egregious culprits known to grammar-maven-dom.

Course, I also had to throw in history lessons as well with each class, which, while fitting since they were music history courses, was really, really bothersome. This past semester, especially, made me want to weep for the future of American scholarship: while I would like to believe it was out of shyness, no one could bother to tell me in what year we landed on the moon, which president was assassinated in the 1960s, what the Cold War was, how television changed mass communication, what happened in the mid 19th Century across Europe, where China is on a map, the capitol of France, etc.