The sad, sad state of college English

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whiterose

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The sad, sad state of college English

You want more examples? How about these beauties:
• “The person was an innocent by standard, who just happened to be the victim of your friend’s careless responsibility.”
• “Society has moved toward cereal killers.”
• “Romeo and Juliet exchanged their vowels.”
• “Willie Loman put Biff on a petal stool.”
• “Another effect of smoking is it may give you cancer of the thought.”
• “The children of lesbian couples receive as much neutering as those of other couples."
Or, when asked to use the past tense of “fly” in a sentence: “I flought to Chicago.”
 

Alpha Echo

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Oh man. Wow. So sad. I wish I didn't believe it, but I do.
 

Deccydiva

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Now that's one thing spellcheck CAN'T do for you...
I look on the bright side - it cuts down the competition when I submit to Agents and publishers! :)
 

K1P1

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Romeo and Juliet then becomes: Rumie and Joleot.
 

selkn.asrai

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Please see http://employees.cfmc.com/adamb/humor/56bc.htm, an essay called "56BC and All That," by R. Lederer. It is a melding of real essays written by students in high school and undergraduate studies.


Excerpts from it:


The American Revolution:
The English put tacks in the tea. The colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps. During the War, Red Coats and Paul Revere was throwing balls over stone walls. The colonists won the War and no longer had to pay taxis.
Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin invented electricity by rubbing 2 cats backwards and declared, "A horse divided against itself cannot stand." Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.

Lincoln: Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while traveling from DC to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope.

Beethoven / Bach:
Beethoven took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Bach practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic, and died from 1750 to the present.

Shakespeare:
Shakespeare was born in 1564, supposedly on his birthday.
 

selkn.asrai

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Having proofread and edited my fellow students' papers in college, talking about this is like having war flashbacks.

One out of many examples: We got a number of people who were illiterate. How in the world did they get into college when they didn't know how to read?
 

Appalachian Writer

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Some of my favorites:
I received a research paper titled: Boarder Control and the Immigration Problem
A line in an essay: I've lived a fast paste life.

There's more but I keep remembering the "I flought to Chicago" and I keep laughing.:D
 

Clair Dickson

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Having proofread and edited my fellow students' papers in college, talking about this is like having war flashbacks.

One out of many examples: We got a number of people who were illiterate. How in the world did they get into college when they didn't know how to read?

Many colleges today aren't so worried about learning as they are about money. You don't have to be able to read-- only to sign your name on the check with the appropriate number of zeros. INHO.

Many schools don't even require students to have finished high school (no GED or h.s. diploma required!) If a student doesn't have the requisite skills in, say, math, the college can put them in Math 098, charge them for 3-4 credit hours BUT it doesn't count towards graduation requirements.
 

CaroGirl

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Ah, me. Physician, heal thyself. If these young adults don't care enough about their own education, the education they're now paying for, to get these things right, it is indeed a sad commentary on their generation.

I read a recent article about this generation of college students that claimed college professors are being driven up the wall by their students' sense of entitlement. They claim their students send them emails appealing their low grades claiming, "But I attended almost all your classes. Surely that gets me at least a B grade."

Let's quit coddling these kids now and try empowering them to learn properly, simply for the sake of learning. Let's try teaching them the importance of diligence, hard work, accomplishment and achievement instead of teaching them that simply "doing their best" is good enough.
 

maestrowork

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They say the state of our educational system is such that college is now the new high school. You'll have to go to grad school to find serious students.
 

dclary

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I've seen similar stories over the years. It's nothing new.

Yes, college is the new high school. But only to a degree.

Get it? GET IT?

LOL.
 

Red-Green

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As a former freshman English teacher, I got a whole rant about the problem, but a lot of it boils down to the horror of average these days. Kids who should have failed get passed and C students get As, because parents and administrators don't want to deal with the fallout of honest assessment.

At a large, respectable college I was regularly called into the dean's office to discuss my semester grades, because students and their parents called to complain. "My son never got anything but As in high school, why did his teacher give him a C?" Like a C was shameful. When I told students, "C means average and you did average work," you'd have thought I'd slapped them from the way they reacted. Yeah yeah yeah, everybody's a fricking unique, special snowflake.

Same thing in first grade, second grade, third grade, which my sister teaches. Only in elementary school, they don't give letter grades. It's all pass or fail, and only kids whose parents are uninvolved get failed. The other kids get passed, so their parents won't pitch a fit.

Insidiously, then, children who can't read, multiply, or name the fifty states get passed onward. It all repeats in high school, where angry parents override teachers, until...voilà! College freshmen who are careless, functionally illiterate dolts.

/rant
 

Soccer Mom

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I have to say, though, that it isn't fair to tar all students with the same brush. They aren't all illiterate dolts. The exerpts aren't a fair cross-section of the whole. It's like the first round of American Idol. You notice the great and the horrible. There's no fun in showing the merely competent.

To think all college (and high school) students are illiterate idiots based on the anecdotes above is like saying all writers are precious nujobs based on the rantings of Anne Rice and LKH. Not so.
 

maestrowork

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As a former freshman English teacher, I got a whole rant about the problem, but a lot of it boils down to the horror of average these days. Kids who should have failed get passed and C students get As, because parents and administrators don't want to deal with the fallout of honest assessment.


"No child left behind" means the below-average are all going to college. Nothing wrong with that, but that means we're delaying the real learning to college, or even grad school, while kids in other countries are learning quantum physics and advance literature in high school.

And Soccer Mom -- I know there are exceptions. But the generalization here is about the trend, and the trend isn't good.
 
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Clio

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Some great posts here. But don't think you are alone. Exactly the same thing is happening in li'l old England. There seems to be a general philosophy, no doubt brought about by political correctness and our Nanny State, that every pupil is worth as much as the next (not saying that's wrong), and rewards and achievements are deserved by all on an equal basis. Gods forbid that we should encourage division between more or less able pupils! That wouldn't do at all in our modern society, where you or I must not think ourselves less of a success than the boy who gets a double first at Cambridge. Of course I understand the ideology behind it all, but sooner or later, when our kids go out into the world of employment, it's going to hit them hard when they can't spell.

As for me, I'm crap at Maths. I have always been crap at maths and will continue to be so. I do not possess a numerate brain. Giving me a C pass to reward my crap maths would be an illusion. I failed my Maths GCE centuries ago, and deservedly so. I think I've managed to get over it and get on with my life without feeling I'm a failure, or have been 'let down' by the system. :)
 

Clair Dickson

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You know-- most of these kids will do just fine in the business world. Sadly. I can't tell you how many business memos and such I've gotten from corporate offices that are written with simply atrocious spelling and grammar.

As a whole, I think our society is tending towards placing less value in education. This is not true in all areas as some do require higher knowledge and training, but in general, I think there is less accountability in the workforce that mirrors the lower accountability in the schools.
 

maestrowork

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I think technologies have something to do with it. There was a study showing that some kids now can't communicate without some kind of gadgets (computer, cell phone, PDAs, etc). They text more than they talk. Their writing is all leet speak. But they're also very good at what they can do with computers and technologies. So who cares if the computer whiz can't spell?

Email (and bulletin boards) has also lowered the quality of writing. It seems like people are more casual with email, even in business settings. Gone are the pristine grammar and spelling, and people don't really care, as long as you get your message across: broken sentences, spelling errors, wrong punctuation, weird formatting, etc. It's all over the workplace.

And for business execs, they have their assistants and speech writers and consultants.
 

myscribe

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At least these are readable. I've had students unable to write complete sentences. One in particular was completely incoherent - no complete sentences or thoughts even. At first I thought it was a joke, but sadly not. I scheduled him for tutoring and tried to give him the skills needed to write a sentence. This was Comp II, no less. He never understood how he passed Comp I with an "A" and was failing my class. I didn't understand it either (the passing Comp I with an "A"). He was the one student that I couldn't reach or help improve.

And all I have to say is that I don't want "cancer of the thought." That would really suck.
 

Tirjasdyn

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Having proofread and edited my fellow students' papers in college, talking about this is like having war flashbacks.

One out of many examples: We got a number of people who were illiterate. How in the world did they get into college when they didn't know how to read?


When you get college presidents like Hank Brown, it's not that unbelievable.

When he took over UNC (Colorado), he held a meeting. He actually said, "We don't need an English program. We can write sentences." Needless to say I was part of the exodus.

He has since sat in major positions at various colleges in Colorado. However we can't blame only him. At CSU they didn't care how we wrote but WHAT we wrote (broken relationships and dead grandmas being the only acceptable fiction topics).
 

maestrowork

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When he took over UNC (Colorado), he held a meeting. He actually said, "We don't need an English program. We can write sentences." Needless to say I was part of the exodus.

Again, I think a lot of schools place their emphasis on technologies, sports and science. Who needs an English program when people learn how to read and write in high school already? But we need computer scientists, physicists, physicians, football stars...

Even lawyers. I'd think they put emphasis on oral and written communication, but sometimes I wonder if what they write is actually English.
 

TerzaRima

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Yesterday I got a thank-you note for a wedding gift from the daughter of a colleague. This young woman just defended her doctoral thesis in plant genetics. "Thank you for the pillows. They will make a lovely edition to our home!"

I blame whole language and creative spelling. The elementary school students in our local school district, which is supposed to be the best in the state, aren't corrected when they make spelling or grammar errors in composition because that would stifle their creativity, or so the logic goes. Nobody learns diagramming or is drilled in grammar anymore. /geezer
 
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