XemaSab (1000+ posts) Thu May-12-11 05:44 PMhttp://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1091556
Original message
From Salon Death to High School English
Like so many depressive, creative, extremely lazy high-school students, I was saved by English class. I struggled with math and had no interest in sports. Science I found interesting, but it required studying. I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility -- no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading. I spent so much of my adolescence feeling different and awkward, and those first canonical books I read, those first discoveries of Joyce, of Keats, of Sylvia Plath and Fitzgerald, were a revelation. Without them, I probably would have turned to hard drugs, or worse, one of those Young Life chapters so popular with my peers.
....blah, blah, blah, more stuid Salon crap blah...
I've stared at the black markings on the page until my vision blurred, chronicling and triaging the maneuvers I will need to teach them in 14 short weeks: how to make sure their sentences contain a subject and a verb, how to organize their paragraphs around a main idea, how to write a working thesis statement or any kind of thesis statement at all. They don't know how to outline or how to organize a paper before they begin. They don't know how to edit or proofread it once they've finished. They plagiarize, often inadvertently, and I find myself, at least for a moment, relieved by these sentence- or paragraph-long reprieves from their migraine-inducing, quasi-incomprehensible prose.
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/05/10/death_to_h...
Drale (1000+ posts) Thu May-12-11 05:47 PM
Response to Original message
1. I've always enjoyed writing
mostly research stuff though. I was a baseball player in high school and probably would have entered the draft once I graduated from college, until I blew out my knee and now I can barely run, I always wonder what could have been with baseball but now I'm dedicating my life to history.
LiberalLoner (1000+ posts) Thu May-12-11 05:51 PM
Response to Reply #1
4. You are a good writer. I have enjoyed reading your posts because you are talented at writing.
Drale (1000+ posts) Thu May-12-11 05:54 PM
Response to Reply #4
8. Well thank you
Hopefully I'll be a world famous Historian one day. lol
Odin2005 (1000+ posts) Thu May-12-11 05:59 PM
Response to Reply #1
11. I'm a history buff myself and like writing history essays on another site I frequent.
LiberalLoner (1000+ posts) Thu May-12-11 06:02 PM
Response to Reply #11
13. You are a good writer, too! Actually I would have to say that DU'ers are
much more literate than the average slice of the populace.
We are just smarter than the average bear, LOL! All our children are above average, too!
I know I sound silly but in truth, I do find it easier to read posts on this site than the occasional dribble that gets posted here from the evil site that shall not be named.
tishaLA (1000+ posts) Thu May-12-11 05:51 PM
Response to Original message
5. I'm amazed at the level of writing I have to grade
at supposedly one of the best public universities in the nation. I joke with my students that I need vodka and vicodin to grade their papers....but it's only half-joking.
hatrack (1000+ posts) Thu May-12-11 06:03 PM
Response to Reply #6
14. That's about it. I couldn't have told you what a direct object was with a gun to my head.
But since I read all.the.time I knew what was right, and what wasn't.
It wasn't about parts of speech or diagramming sentences, I just knew by a sense that approached instinct (though it certainly wasn't something I was born with).
Response to Reply #14DUmmy Sonoman, you are a miserable writer, and you're so stupid I'm sort of embarrassed to paste your reply into this post. A sixth-grade "D" student knows what a direct object is.
29. So, what IS a direct object.
I can be a pretty good writer, but I never took any grammar or composition classes (as in, I never attended school) and have no earthly idea what those kinds of things are. I know what noun, verb, adjective, and adverb mean but that's about it.
XemaSab (1000+ posts) Thu May-12-11 06:56 PM
Response to Reply #29
35. It wasn't until I took a grammar class LAST YEAR
that I could have even told you what a clause was.
I had one teacher senior year of high school who spent time going over punctuation marks and what they're for, but that was in an honors class.
Other than that, it was all osmosis, and that's not optimal at all. Never teaching kids grammar and punctuation isn't doing them a favor.
Zoeisright (1000+ posts) Thu May-12-11 05:55 PM
Response to Original message
9. My husband is the sole English teacher at an alternative high school.
He does have to teach to the test, but he also hammers grammar into their heads, testing them often on tricky words like "their" "there" and "they're", subject, verb, adverbs, etc. But he considers his greatest accomplishment the silent classroom when all the kids are reading, and when a student tells him that he or she now loves to read.
35. It wasn't until I took a grammar class LAST YEAR
that I could have even told you what a clause was.
I had one teacher senior year of high school who spent time going over punctuation marks and what they're for, but that was in an honors class.
Other than that, it was all osmosis, and that's not optimal at all. Never teaching kids grammar and punctuation isn't doing them a favor.
LiberalLoner (1000+ posts) Thu May-12-11 06:02 PM
Response to Reply #11
13. You are a good writer, too! Actually I would have to say that DU'ers are
much more literate than the average slice of the populace.
We are just smarter than the average bear, LOL! All our children are above average, too!
I know I sound silly but in truth, I do find it easier to read posts on this site than the occasional dribble that gets posted here from the evil site that shall not be named.
I do find it easier to read posts on this site than the occasional dribble that gets posted here from the evil site that shall not be named.
Odin2005 (1000+ posts) Thu May-12-11 11:10 PM
Response to Reply #29
37. Here is an example:
Edited on Thu May-12-11 11:10 PM by Odin2005
"John gave Sally the ball." or "John gave the ball to Sally"
John is the SUBJECT (also called the Agent), the ball is the DIRECT OBJECT (also called the Patient), and Sally is the Indirect Object (also called the recipient). The SUBJECT is what is "doing" the verb. The DIRECT OBJECT is what is "being done" by the verb. The INDIRECT OBJECT is the "beneficiary", positive or negative, of the action.
My Autistic Life: http://tselseth.blogspot.com
Do you think Odin is autistic or just a total pervert? Does he know that "John gave Sally the ball" can be construed as borderline pedophiliac especially when referring to her as the "recipient"? What books is he reading in Special Ed?
You know, one would think that in an internet forum where we all communicate through writing it would be fairly easy to determine who has strong writing skills and who does not. I know that I'm a good writer, I don't feel the need to tell all of you how it is all instinctual :whatever:
I will admit that my education was sorely lacking in anything but the most basic grammatical education, but I've managed to pick up the most important concepts elsewhere.
Here you go, another dribble.
(http://www.wvah.com/programs/kingofthehill/dalegribble.jpg)
Here you go, another dribble.
(http://www.wvah.com/programs/kingofthehill/dalegribble.jpg)
That's a Gribble! :thatsright::doh:
OT: Hey GOBUCKS, your favorite person: Moonbattery (http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2011/05/open-thread-1014.html#comments) :lmao:The DUmbest person in the entire Western Hemisphere.
The DUmbest person in the entire Western Hemisphere.
They're so amusing when they put on intellectual airs, and then get the word they want to use confused wtih something that isn't even a real homonym.
:-)
The DUmbest person in the entire Western Hemisphere.
Why did you have to bring the queers into this?