43 Replies to “What Is Our Children, Learning?”

    2. This is NOT an aberration from the Teachers UNIONS. I receive every (near daily) email “update” from my wife’s local, urban, Public Teachers UNION. Each missive is a laughable exercise in ignorance. Seems as though the neo-American Marxist teachers UNIONISTAS can’t spell, or do grammar. Not at all.

      Is it any wonder the Unionistas want to eliminate all testing, and academic rigor from the public schools?

  2. one thing they might be learning is that most teachers are so technologically inept, they are unable to use the grammar and spell check that has been in microsoft word since the 1990s

    1. Proof reading is even more necessary with spell check, i, I, eye, aye, are all spelled correctly, however, eye don’t think eye would use them improperly.

  3. Ha. Nothing personal, but if you know a few teachers, this is not the exception.

    Ps: the headline should be, “What is are children learning.” 😉

  4. I remember seeing a picture of a big banner hung up in a convention hall for a teachers’ convention. “Excellance in Education,” it read.

    And then we read articles by university-trained journalists who can’t spell, or don’t know the difference between words such as “effect” and “affect.” Or “elude” and “allude.”

    Old saying: “If you can’t do it, you teach it. If you can’t teach it, you run for office.”

    1. For the benefit of any teachers reading this: “effect” is the noun, except when it’s a verb, and “affect” is the verb, except when it’s a noun.

  6. Oh, is that familiar to me. I used to mark lab reports that were written like that, even after my students had passed a mandatory English course.

    Forget spelling. Grammar? Perish the thought. Many couldn’t write a comprehensible sentence. Then again, they claimed that it wasn’t my place to criticize the writing of their lab reports as I wasn’t teaching English.

          1. Yes, but it also is used as the personal possessive

            Yes, English is hard, Ebonics be easy

    1. Ward – Grammar is a tool of white supremacists, similar to math and science, according to my understanding of Critical Race Theory.

      1. Grammar makes language, especially written language, work better. Better language improves thinking and allows better organisation and communication of ideas. This has certainly contributed to making some cultures more successful than others. A.k.a. “white supremacy.”

  9. After the GM of the Maple Leafs was replaced a few years ago, I heard a TV personality say something like, “I think this change will make the Leafs way more better.”
    “Way more better?”
    Really?

    1. “I think this change will make the Leafs way more better.”

      Considering that the last time the Leafs won the Stanley Cup was 1967, isn’t the last part of the sentence self-contradictory?

    2. ‘More better’ is half way between better and best.
      I prefer ‘betterer’.

      Imply / infer

      Irregardless

  10. Reminds me of that Simpson episode when Homers says, “Me fail English…..that unpossible”

    Some of the biggest idiots I have ever met…….were my professors at University.

  11. Okay, since we are going to play with grammar, and usage…a distinction by the way…
    Let me just say, in homage to Winston, that ending a sentence with a preposition is something with which I will not put.
    Or, as Vonnegut wroted once…i am bi polar, which is how come I write so good.
    Peace, and God Bless Strunk and White, wheresoever they may be.

  13. It’s fun when poor prioritization is illustrated by results of the same.
    Burning stupid burning brighter every day here in the DMV.

  14. Additional mistake: 4th paragraph. “… CDC guidance for shortened quarantines(…) refer…” should be “refers”. It’s a singular “guidance”, so use “refers”, not refer.

    1. Lori … indeed, one MUST be old to understand proper English. Congrats on your now-rare status and knowledge.

  15. This letter could have been cut in half, most of it is trying to justify their position. And not very well either. But typical of bureaucrats – they feel if they write something long and convoluted it will have more meaning.

    1. Exactly, Maureen. My sweet Granny, gone to her reward over 50 years, would say:
      “it contains so much bullshit, you could grow strawberries in it.”

  16. One wonders how and if such a person could ever feel safe returning to a classroom full of filthy, disease infected children. Public schools have long been known as a veritable petri dish of respiratory illness. Throw in the occasional outbreak of head lice and it’s a wonder they haven’t demanded regular fumigation protocols be implemented. Close the public schools permanently, it’s the only safe thing to do.

  17. The best gift to give a young child is the gift of reading and math before school-age. Also lots of love and attention. My suggestion to my son, whose daughter, then 4, was about to enter French immersion kindergarten, was to teach her to read in her first language. Over that summer, she learned and loves it, now reading Tom Sawyer fluently. Her 4-year-old brother counts accurately to 100, a game for him. My son remembers the lessons I taught him also, when he was 5, to question messages in advertisements etc., as people are just trying to get you to buy cocopuffs or something. I got payback, though, as he also became good at questioning his parents, which is fine, actually. Good early parenting is essential.

  18. Kate, please excuse me for going off topic. Dyslexia is my hobby horse, and this is an opportunity for a PSA, even if it reaches just one person.
    Dyslexia is a major contributor to illiteracy. Dyslexia is not correlated with intelligence. Ten to twenty percent of students are impacted in the English speaking world. Its prevalence and its presentation differ from language to language. It has been recognized for at least 150 years, but the advent of MRIs has changed our understanding and pointed to effective interventions. Although great strides have been made, the disconnect between science and application, in the classroom, is ongoing. The more I learn about fluent reading and writing, the more I realize it is a miracle. See anything by David Kilpatrick or Maryanne Wolf. PS, I’m not diagnosing the author of the referenced letter as dyslexic, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

    1. Then consider the plight of the insomniac dyslectic agnostic who laid awake all night wondering if there was really a dog…

  20. Back in the 1970s, some troublemaker suggested that teachers in our school district should be required to pass competency tests. The president of the local teacher’s union wrote a letter to the local paper to discredit the idea. Someone else wrote a letter to the editor pointing out the many writing errors in that letter. To be fair, Mr. Emch was a math teacher (but not one of my best math teachers).

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