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.
Two groups of British men fighting over citizens relationship with government. In the tradition of the Baron’s and Peasants Rebellion of the 13th century.
I suppose our revolution was a civil war in a sense, since two groups of the same country (Patriots and Loyalists) took up arms against each other in a struggle for control of that country.
As someone who has given up trying to convince anyone that "literally" means "literally" and not "figuratively" and crawls into a corner to weep every time someone says "a bridge too far" to mean "went too far," this only feeds my paranoia about hacks into society's operating system: common language. I do think there is room for dialect and colloquialism (we do it here on the board all the time), but you should have the formal skills down pat. Being well-spoken and fluid (not just fluent) in English is a modern-day superpower.
Of course, I grew up in southeast Texas, where English goes to die. All I'm sayin' is, if I tell you a hen dips snuff, you can look under her wing.
"Literally" means literally but, since the 18C, has also meant figuratively, as a figure of speech and more emphatic synonym. That's literally the case.
Speaking well and fluidly may be a superpower but with great power comes great responsibility, and we ALL know well-spoken and fluid speakers who have abused that responsibility to enrich themselves, to peddle half-true persuasions, to lie. That's true in literally all walks of life.
By the way, other than possibly professional snow shovelers, there is NO "walk" of life; it's also a figure of speech.
To be sure, superpowers can be used for good or ill. Endow the right person with a superpower and you can reverse earthquakes by changing the rotation of the Earth (allegedly, as long as you don't think about it). Endow the wrong person with the same power and before long you'll find yourself kneeling before Zod.
Look it up, kids.
Zod was just misunderstood and unappreciated in his own time.
SE TX is all wet!
Sounds like a slippery situation.
The purpose of education is to help students work toward a greater understanding of their world.
Part of that lies in the things usually considered to be "education": facts, memorization, equations, certification. Equally important is figuring out the reasoning behind things learned, AND how to reason yourself, enabling you to better understand and navigate the world successfully. (And so you're not a sucker for the most recent thing or most outrageous thing you've heard. E.g.blog.)
At one absurd extreme, there are no standards and anything goes. At another absurd extreme, all students are expected to become widely read, brilliantly wise, and personally profound.
In between, in the real world where teachers WORK, they strive to meet each student where they are at that moment of development (knowledge, preparation, discipline, determination, intelligence) and help (nudging, cajoling, persuading, enticing, getting strict, going easy, persuading, enticing, explaining AND listening) so students can continue learning.
well I've been struggling with finding ideal moments to use the semi-colon since; like third grade
Award for today’s “funnierest” post title goes to...??
"What the hell do you know about spelling? You're from goddamned New Jersey!"
No new Bon Jovi album release material for you buddy! That’ll teach yous!?
"Vinnie don't punctuate!"
sometimes things go too far. Wonder what’s next.
Wealthy American flight prior to the civil war. Russia and China go at it for world dominance. Luckily we have the best land and plenty of water so we can at least grow our own food. That will keep us from falling all the way into a third world country. But when a country no longer believes in itself, a fall is inevitable.
The Bear and the Dragon...
...now where have I read that before...
I hate this idea for so many reasons.
Edit: I went back and noticed that the article appears in a self-proclaimed right-wing publication. So I would urge anyone wanting a balanced take on this to get some other news sources to corroborate. I now reserve judgment until I get a broader picture of what Rutgers is doing.
Your edit is very well reasoned. I encourage you to go read the Medium article that was shared earlier in the thread. At the end of that article there is also a link to a reddit thread with people enrolled in the Grad program weighing in. It is good stuff.
The article also has a link to the original e-mail,
It would behoove most people to just read the initial email; it's far less inflammatory than this article (and OP's knee-jerk agreement with it) would lead you to believe.
I did what a lot of us do, which is read the headline and then rush to judgment. But the more I thought about it, the more ludicrous it seemed if taken at face value. So when I clicked on the article, and saw the masthead, I realized this wasn't the kind of news source I would ever trust as a single source, if at all, but I didn't have time to dig further then. Now that I have.....a much different story than what they'd like you to think.
I have a BOLD stament to make.
Another excellent example of colleges making themselves irrelevant. Many companies today feel colleges are not preparing kids adequately for the real world, why not reduce emphasis on grammar. (Sarcastic)
Didn’t MSU eliminate the need for algebra?
Note: I am not sure why someone’s background should dictate anything. Are we going to deemphasize math Or physics based on someone’s background?
This curriculum is literally a graduate level curriculum. It is not 'reducing emphasis on grammar'. It is in fact a rigorous examination of the evolution of grammar and how to think critically about the English language.
Having actually read the email, it seems to be little more than a statement of what most English and Comp. Lit. departments were doing twenty years ago — including at Michigan.
I’m not sure what the controversy is here unless you really hate post-colonial studies (but, why?) or you think English departments were still committed to prescriptivism.
Colonialism is thousands and thousands of years old. Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese are products of colonialism. Paris, London, York, Geneva, Cologne, Aachen, and a thousand of other cities are creations of colonialism. The Roman Empire is the bones of modern Europe yet people don’t see it as a colonizing agent even though it is precisely that.
Post-colonialism is a highly problematic term that associates colonialism strictly in terms of Europeand in Asia, the America’s,and Africa when it is a global phenomenon. Most don’t see Wales and Ireland as colonized countries even though they were colonized long before countries containing brown and black people were colonized by white people.
The Ottomans are completely ignored which is utterly insane considering how large of an impact they had on the Middle East, Balkans, and North Africa.
Redcoated white men with pith helmets is how we see colonialism. That is why “Post-colonialism” is a problematic term.
The author of this article saw BLM in the email title and then just extrapolated from there.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Have you ever read the writings of the founding fathers of this nation? Their English was often, shall we say, quite creative.
There is a reason that English developed the rules and structure that kids are now taught in grade school: it was very chaotic for much of its early history (one could even argue that it is still chaotic with the various dialects, pidginization, slang and outright incorrect usage out there today, but that is subject to interpretation). Even after the nascent periods of the development of the English language (Old and Middle English), the lack of standards and formalization (and the subsequent confusion and inefficiency resulting from it) led to various movements to create those rules (Noah Webster being a prime example).
You want formalization? Try using 'its' correctly.
I hate autocorrect - I missed this one earlier and just fixed it.
Its/it's and effect/affect misuses are irritating.
Vershawn Young writes about it much more brilliantly than I could so I'll let him speak for me
https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1095&context=ijcs
This is click-baity propaganda, please remove from the site. I don't understand the mod'ing around here, this is obviously so irrelevant to Michigan sports.
What they do at Rutger is fair game here.
This post joins a long list of posts that have been totally irrelevant to Michigan sports since March. I guess that's what happens during a pandemic.
OT season has existed at least since 2010 when I joined the board.
Being able to speak well, and to some extent write well, helps career advancement.
It's one of the things colleges can do that is actually useful.
Deciding not to teach it as much is not doing those students any favors.
Along these lines and for similar reasons, maybe they can de-emphasize knowing correct formulas in math, science, and engineering; or de-emphasize writing computer code that runs.
I guess being able to read and comprehend isn't high on your list for judging success. Otherwise, before you showed your ass, you would have taken the time to read the original email instead of relying on the synopsis of a right-wing critique that predictably showed the bias of the author and publisher.
You are right. I read only the summary and not the original.
It would have been far better of me to read the original and not go by someone,s summary.
Now that i have read the original, i consider my previous post to be off base and wrong.
My opinion instead is that the writer seems to want the program to be substantially indoctrination.
It would help if people read the actual email and not a commentary from a person at TCU who apparently has a strained grasp of the English language (or at least how it's taught). Also, this entire discussion happened in late June, so the fact they finally got around to posting about it now says something abut how much work this site put into critical analysis. I'm not an English teacher so I can't speech too critically to the actual pedagogical changes proposed here, but based on the 114+ comments in this thread it doesn't seem like the vast majority of posters here can either.
At this point the comments here have devolved to the usual battle lines, but I would have hoped people would have been slightly more critical to at least read the substance behind the article and not blindly take the truth from a site that claims "Anti-Trump enforcement" of felony wiretapping because the college kid didn't tell his professor he was recording her, which in PA is the black-letter law requiring two-person consent for such a recording. So in other words, the dipshit didn't understand the law and then got mad that it was enforced against him.
Everyone has biases. The idiocy of our times is academics telling people that only white people have biases. That letter lost me when it blathered on combating bias as if it is a one way street.
The English language is constantly evolving. We speak significantly differently than those who lived in the 19th century. Shakespeare wrote in English but one that today requires taking courses to understand. Noah Webster went out of his way to Americanize so there is a precedent to what they are proposing.
The Right overreacts because the Left gives them cause to. American academia in the humanities is a dumpster fire. It needs to be reformed badly.
"The Right overreacts because the Left gives them cause to."
Maybe the Right should practice some of that personal responsibility that they've been preaching about my entire fucking life.
I'm sorry, but the idea that the Left is to blame for the Right's problems is one of the worst and most annoying arguments made by holier than thou centrists.
Everyone is responsible for their own actions. Few actually do take responsibility.
A leftist calling someone “holier than thou”? Oh, the Hypocrisy! Mirror, Shop Smart. Shop Smart, Mirror.
Politics is mostly about moral posturing. Nauseatingly so. Few are consistently moral. Ideology trumping morals almost every time.
The Left is no more responsible for reactionary acts than cops are responsible for rioting. Extreme Bette radicalism which begets more extremism which begets more radicalism. It is a never ending.cycle.
It's not profound to say everyone has biases and that humanities education in this country needs to be reformed and then, when an act is taken to reform a part of it in a meaningful way, complain it's too polarizing for your tastes.
I'm not going to get in some debate about why combating biases in English education is seemingly one-way (teaching people a language still, by its nature, imposes restrictions and requirements on the learner to conform), but "The Right overreacts because he Left gives them cause to" is just "they're asking for it because of how they dress/act/look". The designations of Left and Right don't really apply here (and they don't really for most situations given that people are not usually that binary), only that one group is saying they would like to address systemic biases in how a means of communication is taught in this country and the other is annoyed that change is occurring that they are aware of. Because as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, these changes have been happening in departments for years and few noticed them or cared.
Butgers
Somewhat related:
https://twitter.com/BreeNewsome/status/1287005076591128576?s=20
Why does Ace retweet this dumb shit?
How can she possibly use the word pedagogy if this is the case. Holy expletive.
Good God this world has lost its fucking mind.