OT and SIAP: Rutgers' new stance on grammar: "Me fail English? That's unpossible."
Political reasonings aside (and I was very hesitant to put this up because of that), this is an atrocious act. No "Big Ten school" should take this position. This should be grounds for immediate expulsion from the conference.
Are you kidding me? That's pretty much a whole extra ounce! Not to mention distilleries put out their bourbon in 750 ml bottles and I'm cool with that (so long as they don't reduce it to 700 ml like the bottles are overseas).
Nope, not kidding, my whole marketing strategy was destroyed by buying 500 ml jars. Tragic.
Mooshine?
I wonder if XM distills and bottles such a concoction?
It was all metric when I was in the army. That said, if we were doing a convoy I was always converting the km distances to standard in my head.
Math is easier with metric. That is certain.
"A new survey shows that the average American man’s penis is 5.6 inches long. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time we switched over to the metric system. (I’m packing 142 millimeters)." - Conan O'Brien
:-) that's a good one, but 5.6" average can't be right. That's a made up number for the less well endowed to feel better about themselves.
Didn't work. I still feel pretty bad.
We tried this back in the 70's, and it failed. The American people rejected it, but mostly industry just said 'NO'! All of our manufacturing equipment, quantities, scales, resources were in Imperial measurements, and the cost of switching over was somewhat more than Congress was going to underwrite.
And by 'somewhat', I mean monstrously SIGNIFICANT!
It didn't exactly fail. Congress made metric adoption voluntary, not mandatory like in other countries. When you adopt a practice on a voluntary level, you will get only partial acceptance. It achieved this - metric has partially integrated our society, but it hasn't dislodged the old system.
(Incidentally, mandatory conversion isn't a simple thing either. Canada has converted in theory but in practice it's a bit of a mess. Canadians will state their height in feet/inches, their weight in pounds, and use Fahrenheit for indoor temps and Celsius for outdoors.)
The metric system is the tool of the devil. My car gets 10 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I like it.
Every physical science class I took in both high school and college used metric system. It's just better and cleaner for math.
You're worried about political reasonings but not the completely overt racism of associating language used by Black people as uneducated and then mocking it with a Ralph Wiggums quote?
I still don't know how to post a link on this version of the site, but a piece called "'Critical Grammar' and the Great Distortion" on medium.com explains how this description of what Rutgers plans to do is inaccurate. Rutgers believes that they will increase awareness of grammar in their students.
Thanks
There's a chain link icon on the formatting bar when you go to post. It's highlighted in maize and blue in the picture below. Click on that and a box shows up that you can past the url into:
Ah - thank you.
Thank you for bringing this article up, and thank you to the other poster for linking it. Everyone here should read it before weighing in. Great article.
And if they are too lazy, they should at least read this excerpt.
This passage should be clear to anyone who takes the time to read what is written. The “familiar dogma” here is the problem. It assumes that students from multilingual backgrounds will be harmed by a focus on grammar at the expense of broader writing issues. This dogma can leave students without the strong, sentence-level foundation they need to write well. What Rutgers is proposing — and what the letter clearly says — is a shift; it is not proposing to de-emphasize grammar, but to encourage “critical awareness,” or an understanding of the history and development of English grammar, how it works, and the potential impacts of the choices made in the writing process. Rather than lowering the bar, as the critics claim, the department is raising it.
I reached out to the chair of the department, Rebecca Walkowitz, who told me via email thatthe effort will result in “more attention to grammar in the aggregate, not less. Our standards remain rigorous and high, and our goal is to help students succeed in academic writing and other writing genres.”
This is an absurd take on the Rutgers email. The email explicitly calls for *more* attention to grammar, and some cancel culture dipshits wave their hands and assert the opposite, with the apparently justified belief that nobody will actually make it past the headline.
From the article that quotes from the supposed email:
Under a so-called critical grammar pedagogy, “This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds at a disadvantage,” the email states.
“Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them w/ regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents.”
So there's a chance to normalize pig Latin?
Uckfay Hattay.
Atthay.
We might loosen the rules about English grammar, but compromising Pig Latin is just a step too far here!
Allowing the inmates to run the curriculum isn't new.
Inmates? Really? Deplorable word choice.
My apologies for triggering you!
Also predictable, as will be the inevitable "I triggered you" response
See, proper spelling is important too. I almost didn't recognize you as you misspelled your own name, Mr. Klytus.
But I apologized.
You apologized in midwestern English dialect you brute! Now try it again in Chesapeake region pidgin and go to your room!
So you clearly didn't read Rutgers' email or the many explanatory posts, just thought you'd spew some awful shit. Nice job, youfilthyanimal
Read the article. Still unclear what they're actually (not) enforcing.
But I will say this, using "x" performatively (folx) bugs the shit out of me. Proper spelling is not an act of oppression.
I have a shirt that says “Skillz Team” on the back. I like the shirt, but I also appreciate correct spelling and grammar. What should I do [wear]? (The shirt was printed in Africa does this matter? help?). I also took a class at Michigan on non-standard English in the School of Education but can’t recall much of anything other than they never said “Ebonics”.
Z for S is creative license.
X for A, O, or KS is bullshit.
XKXY if you say so.
I seen this coming. I ain’t got no time for this nonsense.
Irregardless, I don’t have time for all y’alls.
All y’all is pleural of y’all. The “s” is redundant.
25 miles away Princeton University is laughing.
delete thread, will become political
...or covid caused.
The next thing you know, the English department will push the approval for the use of Rutger for Rutgers. THE HORROR!
Already done and codified. Rutger needs the approval of all the other 13 B1G schools to start using the 's' again.
I agree with Franklin. We should have invented our own more logical language instead of the Kings, illogical in many cases, English!
Are you suggesting we have, yet, another English Revolution?
Actually, a Germanic language revolution. It may be too late!
Actually, we had the American Revolution. The English had the English Revolution (aka English Civil War) from 1642 - 1660.
Which proves that I can be pedantic in History as well as English.
Some British historian was saying that what they call the English Civil War should be called the English Revolution and what we call the American Revolution should be called the English Civil War.
He had a point with calling their civil war a revolution, because the king was overthrown, but I forget why he thought our revolution should have been called a civil war. Maybe as we weren't fighting to remove the king?