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Rants are for off-topic and over the top posts. If you are a sensitive soul, you might want to pretend this folder doesn't exist, and skip lightly over it.

I teach English at a university and a high school, and I've come to the conclusion that grading poorly-written essays sucks out a little bit of your soul, bit by bit.

Will wrote: "I teach English at a university and a high school, and I've come to the conclusion that grading poorly-written essays sucks out a little bit of your soul, bit by bit."

Question is, at which point do you have so little soul left, you now qualify as cool, and at which point no longer as human?

And something else that has long bothered me, if your soul is totally sucked out, do you become a zombie or a vampire or just an indie?

Zombies eat flesh, Vampires drain your blood. I'd say you become an Indie, who these days is hell bent on getting your attention as the reader. To suck you into their world.

Claudine wrote: "Zombies eat flesh, Vampires drain your blood. I'd say you become an Indie, who these days is hell bent on getting your attention as the reader. To suck you into their world."

Mmm. If his students wanted to write, or even read, Will would have no cause for complaint.

Seriously, I know what he feels like. I spent one entire year when I should have been doing market economics -- teaching remedial English. And not to the children of Asian or Continental immigrants (their parents take care to get them taught well), to children from anglo-saxon middle-class homes, kids headed by right (name) for the Treasury and the big institutions... God help us all. Infuriating. (I was so pissed off, I manoeuvred to have the education minister fired for agreeing that Mathematics and English could be removed from the matriculation compulsory syllabus because they were "unfair to the less privileged" -- moron!)

You'd hate to see the current state of SA schools then.

On my mother's side of the family they're teachers and preachers. The teachers have been spinning in their graves for years at what was done to a pretty good Scottish 1870 model education machine honed to a fine fettle.

I think teaching might be what finally drives me to become serious about my writing!
There are, however, many good days, and it is great when you see a student start to get it.
I've been tutiring a kid for several months and was starting to feel a built guilty about taking his parents' money; however, I have seen some real improvement in him lately, which makes us all feel better.
Still, it doesn't beat writing for me.

I have a friend who is professor of English 101 (How to write sentences), English 102 (Paragraphs for Dummies) and finally English 103 (Research Papers). Now, everyone at her college has to take one of these three courses. Students test into one of the three levels. And if you test into 101 or 102, you have to complete up to 103.

She was having an especially bad weekend, morning sickness and the flu which is a special sort of hell designed only for pregnant women. So, I offered to grade some papers for her. After all, I know more than enough grammar to handled the 101 and 102 classes.

They were so eyebleedingly bad I wanted to slap each and every single one of her students. Now, all of these students not only graduated high school, but did well enough to get into college. And yet they couldn't write a simple sentence. It was beyond horrific.

The image of your going up to each of them and slapping them has me smiling...

Patricia Sierra wrote: "The image of your going up to each of them and slapping them has me smiling..."

It helped to perk her up, too. And kept me sane as I wandered through things like:

(the assignment I was working on was to observe something and write a paragraph about it.)

For my parragraf I observe squirels in the park mostly they ran around sometimes they stop and eat they were gray and brwon.

Slap, slap, slap! Spell check moron! Spell fucking check!

Anytime people tell me about how whatever new plan would make the educational system in our country worse, I laugh. It's already so much worse that who ever is speaking imagines it's not even funny.

WTF.....

But they can send text messages...

Those students may be all that the colleges are offered, and if they don't take them they go broke. The schools are matriculating illiterates. It is a result of decades of political correctness, of not having tests for fear that Stupid Johnny will be hurt when he fails.

Patricia Sierra wrote: "But they can send text messages..."

Ja but it is g8 bcos it is all in txt spk no spell check.

No need for a brain to use a cell phone to send meaningless messages from one side of the couch to the other to their bff about the movie they are watching and the boy watching with them.

Dit ook. That's just technology catching up with reality.

Andre Jute wrote: "Those students may be all that the colleges are offered, and if they don't take them they go broke. The schools are matriculating illiterates. It is a result of decades of political correctness, of..."

Yep, but none of that actually solves the problem.

A million years ago (well the 1970's) Heinlein was writing about how if you need to take Bonehead English or Math For Dummies no college should accept you. He had the wild idea that if you hadn't mastered grammar school subjects, you needed to still be in grammar school.

So far I have yet to see any convincing reason to believe he was wrong.

The college students I teach are mainly adults going back to school. Many have not had an English class in over 20 years. Their grammar is often poor at first, but they are uniformly more willing to try than my high school students. Plus, I try to point out that many of my adult students actually write quite a bit in their jobs.
I think a bigger problem is that there are too many kids who never read and therefore don't learn how sentences are supposed to be. Their vocabularies are very limited as well. By not starting out with a solid base of reading, there is not much hope they will ever become good writers.

That's well said, Will. I recall a popular bumper sticker back in the mid 90's (I was long out of school) that said, "I is a college student and gots me a degrees." I thought it was funny the first few times I read it. When I realized the truth of the statement, my smile faded away.

As for myself, I was a long standing victim of 'dialect' for my part of Florida. That's in the deep south for America. I actually had to go north to visit Texas... but then I assume we all know our geography, another much ailing subject among students these days.

After I got my speedbumps cleared up, I started to write like tomorrow didn't exist. I still have a problem with seen vs saw and were vs was. I know the rules. It just wants to flow out like it was badly spoken...and I slip. I even miss it in self edits.

Funny thing, I read somebody else's work, I can spot the errors a mile away. I digress, apologies.

What kills me are the massive amounts of teens and young adults today who do read tons and still get it all wrong. Unless of course, you're OK with re-reading lines from the Twilight series, which is enough to make a guy like me mutate and rampage.

Daniel wrote: "What kills me are the massive amounts of teens and young adults today who do read tons and still get it all wrong."

Grammar, good language generally, is like religion. "Give me your child until he is seven, and I guarantee he will speak and write properly all his life."

What Andre said. Did any of you know (that don't have young children currently in the early school grades) that the alphabet is not taught until grade 1? At least here. I taught my kids the alphabet at home, the preschool they attended taught them letters in the year before grade 1. The primary schools apparently prefer them not knowing the alphabet in relation to stringing words together. Now how FUBAR is that??

I hate phonetics. Yes, it serves a purpose but at what frigging cost??

Sorry, I have a bee in my bonnet about education at the moment.

Hmmm... my oldest hasn't hit kindergarten yet (he starts this fall) but in our area they want the kids to know the alphabet before they get to kindergarten. It's not like you can't start if you don't know, but they want them to know the alphabet, numbers, left/right, colors, body parts, address, phone number, use scissors, and be able to stand on either foot for ten seconds.

I'm happy to see I'm in a fairly sane school district.

My eldest son (18), much to my dismay, hardly ever reads. Yet he took the prize for top English student at school last year. I can only put it down to the fact that I read to him from the minute he could focus on a book. I remember him running around the house at 18months shouting 'Butter, eh?' after I'd read him 'The King's Breakfast'. He was too young to understand it, but he just loved the sound of the words. He was reading before he got to kindergarten and not because I taught him.

As a junior primary teacher, I was frequently appalled at the number of children who came to me at 7 years old who didn't have books at home and had never been read to. Teaching them to read and write was extremely difficult. Some kids just don't stand a chance.

Keryl that seems to be a South African thing. For some reason here, the public schools don't require that a child knows the alphabet. They focus more on phonetics and sounding out words than teaching them the alphabet. Our schooling system is in huge trouble though what with the legacy of apartheid and what that meant for scholars who were not white.

We've got areas that are hot for phonetics in the US. We just don't happen to live in one. In the US if you do public schooling it's determined (for the most part) by where you live. So we end up with this odd phenomena where people without kids live in some areas (trendy, urban places) and then immediately leave those areas as soon as they have school age kids. Or houses two streets away on the other side of the school district line are 50K more expensive than identical ones in the wrong side of the line. Silly crap like that.

Katie wrote: "As a junior primary teacher, I was frequently appalled at the number of children who came to me at 7 years old who didn't have books at home and had never been read to. Teaching them to read and write was extremely difficult. Some kids just don't stand a chance."

When I was in advertising, I would sometimes check on the work of the market researchers by taking a clipboard and going into the field, into people's homes. It is incredible how many people have no books or images or music in their homes. As Katie says, their kids just don't stand a chance.

When we researched this, we had to count religious and calendar images, and the TV schedule magazines, to get as showing at all in the statistics.

Keryl wrote: " In the US if you do public schooling it's determined (for the most part) by where you live.

We chose to live in Bandon not because it is such a pretty village, though that is true too, but because it has a superior school (not public though).

My mother was a teacher and an educationalist. She used to say that the most consistent high-quality education anywhere in the world wasn't from the state or necessarily from the elite private schools, but from the schools founded and run by the minorities in each place. I have broadly observed this to be true. Where Catholics are a minority, their schools are excellent. Where Protestants are a minority, their schools are excellent. Also the schools run by linguistic minorities. They have to try harder to attract students, they are inspected harder by the authorities, and they generally take more pride in their product, which is the depth and polish of your child's education.