Yep. I do exactly the same thing. Whenever I read anything I get drawn to mispelt words. It's quite annoying sometimes because the mispelt word bugs me.

Anybody else able to read really quickly? But still remember a lot about the text? When I've had to revise for exams I can usually read through the textbook or course notes a few days before and then sit the exam without any problems. This only works if I'm interested in the subject and I understand what it's trying to say. If I don't then it fails miserably

- Trevor

I hadn't ever thought of that. I've read that English speaking people (and, I would assume people with languages written similarly) don't read letters, but read words, just like one would if he were reading pictographic East Asian languages, the advantage to alphabetic languages being that one can sound out a word if he's never read it before, which, of course, only generally helps if he's heard it before, discounting knowledge of potential roots.

Heh... yeah I have the exact same thing. Only downside is that 3 days later most of the info I gathered while reading is gone again.
In case of exams this is not a bad thing since most of the time I only have to take them once. (I hope)

Some of the advantages in having a language you can sound out even if you don't know the word is lost when you think about the number of pronunciation rules English has. And that's not even beginning to deal with the foreign words that have now become part of English.

English must be very difficult to learn if it's not your mother tongue. There is a large number of words that sound the same but are written differently depending on context. Their, they're, there etc...

- Trevor

After the exam I would forget about the subject. You can still ask me questions and I can answer them but it's not quite the same as if I had sat down and worked through it all properly.

I had to learn LaTeX (Okay, can't typeset it properly here so the capitialisation will have to do) a while back for my dissertation so I sat down and read through the manual in a couple of days and just got on with it. It was strange at first because I was used to WYSIWYG editors like Word but after a while I got used to it.

- Trevor

I think that that's actually related to why Americans are accused (rightly) of being overly monolingual. It's because we have nowhere to practice any other language. Those near French Canada have something of an advantage in that respect, as well as those in Texas and Florida, due to the large Spanish-speaking population.

But in Europe, one can drive an hour and be in an area where everyone speaks a different language, so it's easier to ``practice''. Of course, that's just my provincial theory.

Edit: My point being that it's easy to practice a new computer language, as one has nearly immediate correct feedback, and, generally, one has a distinct task to perform with the language.

those in Texas and Florida, due to the large Spanish-speaking population

And California. I know one Los Angeleno who came to England, and was so used to serving staff being illegal Hispanic immigrants that he kept trying to order beer in pubs in Spanish, through force of habit.

Peter

Every time I see this guy now, he's extremely polite. Up to a point where he would probably even wash my car if I asked him to. It still feels pretty good when I think about it.

That was a fantastic story! Thanks for sharing it.

I stand corrected. That was a well written, coherent explanation of the meaning of integrity, and I applaud yours, sir. I suspect there will be no miscarriages in the application of law within your jurisdiction

And here's an accompanying sound effect to the excellent number plate story:

(Rousing rounds of applause, audience whistles, foot stamping, etc.)

Now THAT is what I call "revenge", and served frozen solid in this case....

When I was in 5th grade in Canada (A very long time ago now), we had a series of reading comprehension and speed tests in the english class. I upset their bell curve quite a bit when they decided that my average reading speed was around a thousand words a minute with 98% recall. This was so far outside the norm that they reran the tests about four times to check if I was faking it

I can't actually remember a time when I couldn't read to some degree or other, and my father says I sort of worked it out for myself around 3 or 4 years old.

In the right mood, which is often late at night when I'm just tired enough to be drifting into a sort of alpha-state, the reading becomes so automatic and involved it's sometimes like I'm seeing the book as a movie (I have a very visual mind), and I've been know to go through a 250 page novel in less than an hour. In this state I often read eight or nine books in a row, and then wonder why I'm so tired the next day

Mind you, I don't personally know anyone else who buys fiction twenty books at a time, and then reads them all in a weekend. Maybe I'm just peculiar somehow? Nah, that can't be it...

That's why I like buying books when I'm in Canada or the US, they give you a bulk discount.

pca

I can't actually remember a time when I couldn't read to some degree or other, and my father says I sort of worked it out for myself around 3 or 4 years old.

My mum's favourite cutesy story about me learning to read, is that I was three when my little brother came along, naturally causing Mum to be dead tired when reading me my bedtime story. So she started missing bits out to get through Mr Men or A.W. Awdry quicker -- and I noticed and started watching the book while she read to make sure she didn't miss words out. (I must have been a nightmare kid!) Eventually I could tell which word she'd missed out just by the look of it, and the rest was history.

Peter

I stand corrected. That was a well written, coherent explanation of the meaning of integrity, and I applaud yours, sir. I suspect there will be no miscarriages in the application of law within your jurisdiction

Thanks. Of course, I can't speak for the entire police force, but I try to do my job to the best of my abilities. Which is sometimes hard because most of the times when I intervean somewhere people aren't really happy about it. (because they're at fault and got caught obviously)
Still, everything seems worth while it again those seldom times when I can actually really help someone.

After all, I joined the police force not because I like pestering people (for real! ), but because I like helping people. Though somedays when I've been in another bar fight, and I've been called names and spit upon once more it's hard to keep believing that. But up 'till now I'm doing fine. It's brought me into many interesting situations and I've seen things most people don't have a chance of seeing in their entire life. I could probably fill a book by now and I've only been at it for 5 years. (wow, has it really been that long?)

> I've read that English speaking people [...] don't read letters, but read words

In fact, in English, people tend to read groups of words at a time, (which is an) (important thing to) (remember when) (setting type as) (poorly-chosen line breaks) (can affect the) (ability to read) (smoothly) - have you ever noticed that when reading out loud, you tend read ahead a few words and then speak, rather than say each word as you read it?

Whereas in German it is common to read groups of letters, which is why they can cope with reallylongwordslikethis.

What a remarkable proof. Thank you.

I find that I tend to read entire paragraphs at once, which is why I suffer from the problem (mentioned above somewhere) that I'm immediately drawn to the one spelling/grammar mistake in the entire paragraph.

Also, if the paragraph is very large (more than about 10 sentences or 60 words), I have to start from the beginning and read it more slowly. As you can image, this makes it very hard to read anything by Umberto Eco or Eric Hobshawm.

In thirteen years of education, those six lessons were the only formal instruction in English grammar any of us had.

Sigh... this topic makes me realize just how badly education has slipped in this (U.S.A.) country.

When I finished 8th grade (that would have been at age 13 or 14) my English teacher had quite literally taught us (or at least attempted to teach us) everything there was to know about English grammar. I mean, everything.

Things like use of the nominative case and nominative form of the verb "to be" in instances where uncertainty of expression called for the subjunctive. Example: "I would not do that if I were he." is correct grammar, and we were taught why it was correct.

In all the remainder of my education (an additional 10 years or so) I was never, not one time ever, exposed to any aspect of grammar that I hadn't been taught in the eighth grade.

When I try to discuss these things with my contemporaries (well, not exactly contemporaries, there aren't too many people around as old as I am -- say, people 10 years younger than I) they just look at me with a blank expression and think, frequently aloud, that I am weird.

Y'know, not even nostalgia is what it used to be.

tanstaafl.

``Necessary'' vs. ``neccesary'' is probably the biggest one.

Naah... it has to be the deadly duo of "accommodate" and "recommend". I had to just burn those two words into my brain, brute force by rote. All those "c"s and "m"s are hard to keep straight.

tanstaafl.

Peter (resisting the temptation to reword that sentence with "at which...")

Ending a sentence with a preposition? That is something up with which I shall not put!



tanstaafl.

In Kindergarten, on the last day of the year, we had one lesson on reading. That entire year, after learning the alphabet (again, the same as in pre-k), we left for the summer knowing exactly one word, and that word even had a contraction in it. I think the particular word we were taught sums up the educational system of the U.S. quite well: CAN'T.

I never had formal grammar instruction. Perhaps it is because I went to 7 different schools, both public and private. Fortunately, my mother is an English teacher and my father is an engineer, so I learned to speak properly at home. Things such as the proper usage of "whom" came naturally to me, since proper english was spoken at home. When I took the PSAT, I scored abysmally on the grammar section. I generally speak correctly, but I don't know why it is correct.

Something that is probably worse than our grammar instruction is mathematics. In first, second, and third grades, kids learn addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. If they are lucky, they might even learn fractions and decimal points. After that, most kids do not learn any new mathematics until 8th grade, when they study PRE-algebra. I was lucky in that I had pre-algebra in 5th grade, after only sitting idle for one year and moving slowly all the years previous.

Why are our schools so pathetic? Is it the teachers? The system? Perhaps it is the students? Our school day was 7 hours long. Of that, we spent about an hour in class changes and about 10 minutes at the beginning and end of every class. Of the remaining 4 hours, 30 minutes was lunch-time. Only about half of the remainder was used in productive instruction, which was very slow. Of course, every teacher made sure to assign more busy-work to take home than all the time they actually spent teaching us. This was in the advanced classes....

-Biscuits

CAN'T

Wow, the parents must have loved those teachers after that summer

As for the rest of it, I don't think all educational systems are too bad. Although I had the benefit of attending school in one of the top school systems in the country (lot of good it did me ).

However, overall I'd say that our educational system has devolved into nothing more than daycare.

it has to be the deadly duo of "accommodate" and "recommend". I had to just burn those two words into my brain, brute force by rote.

But you see those words fairly often. The ones that get me are the ones that are oddly-spelt and slightly obscure: inoculate/innocuous I had to just memorise.

Peter

However, overall I'd say that our educational system has devolved into nothing more than daycare

Wonderfully put !

However, I don't think it's the fault of the teachers or schools entirely. The parents also have a lot to do with it.
See, when I was in school, a teacher was still a person for whom there was respect (that wasn't even that long ago, say 10-15 years). Now that seems to be completely gone. I've got a few uncles that teach, all in the higher education department. There are some of the most demotivated people I've ever seen in my life and they all long for the day of their retirement (though some even got more than ten years to go)

They've told me stories that I found so hard to believe that they had to be true. One of the best (and therefor one of the most tragic) is still that they can't really afford to fail students anymore. If they do this now, they risk the that the parents of the kid come to school with their lawyer (I kid you not!) to "talk" about the kid's bad grades ! Of course, it's always the teacher's fault according to the parents. Their kid is such a sweet boy/girl, it's simply not possible that it got such bad grades because it was too lazy to lift a finger of schoolwork throughout the enire year.

In my days (god I feel like an old fart when I say that!) when I got a bad grade or I got some sort of school punishment I could expect a lot of trouble when I got home. Most of the time I had to do the "assignment" twice : once for the teacher and once for my parents. I've cursed a lot in those days , but looking back at it that wasn't too bad a system. Now most of the times when a kid gets punished by a teacher, their parents tell it that it doesn't have to do the assignment, so it doesn't. There's very little teachers can do about that.

I've had some excellent teachers over the years. I was always fortunate to have better-than-average schools and good teachers. My classmates were rarely troublemakers or anything like that. Still, even with dedicated teachers, we spent less than 2 hours a day actually productively learning. All the class changes and disruptions made it difficult to get much done. There were also extremely gifted people put in the same classes as extremely slow kids. Either the teachers had to move at a fast pace and leave the slow kids behind, or they had to spend day after day explaining the same concept over and over again. The methods of teaching haven't really improved in the past few hundred years and they are starting to break down as more and more people are crammed into every classroom and as we expect people to go into life with more than a 6th-grade education.

I was lucky, however: on a good day in some of the classes in my highschool, no learning took place. On a bad day people were having knife fights, throwing marble bricks at eachother, or just brawling on a bad day. I was jumped one time during school by a group of black thugs who just wanted to get back at "whitey." They hit me, and about 10 other people, from behind with a 40 lb. backpack. I was knocked unconcious and had one of my teeth badly chipped. The next week, they were all back in class.

I would say 1/3 of the people in my school got my caliber of education, which is to say halfway decent. The rest got nothing at all, except daycare and an easy way to meet drug dealers. How are we going to clean up our schools and get rid of all the people who don't want to be there? Even after we do that, will things really improve? There are a bunch of sorry teachers out there, but even with excellent ones and good students, it is difficult to overcome the system. And I don't think the Republican's genius proposal for standardized testing is going to do squat. All it is going to do is encourage teaching to the test. The system is already flawed and they are only going to make it more entrenched instead of giving teachers the freedom they need to actually teach.

-Biscuits

And I don't think the Republican's genius proposal for standardized testing is going to do squat. All it is going to do is encourage teaching to the test.

England and Wales (maybe Scotland too, dunno) have had standardised testing for a while now. All it has proved is that there's one thing worse than teaching to a test, and that's parenting to a test: "Why are you wasting my child's time teaching this stuff that's not on the syllabus, when you could be going again over stuff that is?"

I'm sure I got a better education between the ages of 5 and 14 (not taught to tests) than between 14 and 18 (taught to tests). The material was less advanced, of course, but there were no arbitrary restrictions on how far the teacher would take it if the class all upped and ran with it.

In fairness, there were a couple of teachers who didn't teach to the test, either by announcing at the start of certain lessons "this isn't on the syllabus, I'm just telling you in case you're interested", or by just handing the more advanced pupils other stuff to get on with while they laboured the point on syllabus material to the rest of the class. But such teachers were in the minority, at least in science subjects. (Arts subjects, I'd imagine, are less susceptible to teaching to a test, because you can get arbitrarily advanced in an essay on Macbeth, whereas you simply can't solve GCSE maths questions with vector calculus.)

The only classroom lessons we got after the age of 14 that weren't taught to a test, were the sixth-form General Studies lessons I mentioned above. (They were nominally aimed at the A-level in General Studies, but as the examiners are allowed to ask absolutely anything, you can't teach to the test.) This had two results: firstly, about half the pupils simply bunked the lessons wholesale, and secondly, those of us who did turn up got interesting, insightful, challenging teaching such as most of us hadn't heard for years.

Peter

Things like use of the nominative case and nominative form of the verb "to be" in instances where uncertainty of expression called for the subjunctive. Example: "I would not do that if I were he."

I don't think you're remembering that quite correctly, or you're misusing terms, or something. There are actually two grammar trip-ups in ``I would not do that if I were he.'', which is correct English, but not, I think, quite for the reasons you state.

The first, and simpler one, is that the verb to be (in the form ``were'' in this sentence) is an intransitive verb, which means that it does not take a direct object. As such, when you use a noun or pronoun in the predicate side of the sentence, it is being used as a predicate nominative, which means that it's renaming the subject. As should be obvious, the direct object would be in the objective case, and the predicate nominative in nominative case. In English, nouns do not take different forms between nominative (or subjective) and objective cases, but pronouns often do, and ``he'' is the nominative case of the pronoun that would be ``him'' in objective case. A good, simple example is that one should not state on the phone ``It's me'', but, rather, ``It is I'', à la Lamont Cranston.

The second has to do with the subjunctive mood or tense. The subjunctive mood is used when, as you say, the state is uncertain, like when you use ``if'' or ``might''. In modern English, the subjunctive forms of the vast majority of verbs, if not all of them, are the same as their third-person past tense forms. Many modern English language scholars will tell you that the subjunctive form is all but dead. It really has no reason to still be here, as there is always some other word that indicates the subjunctivity of the verb. I think that it still sounds nicer to use the subjunctive, though.

Anyway, my point is that those two rules are not related, so you're either conflating those two things, or your teacher taught you rules combined together for common happenstances.

Either the teachers had to move at a fast pace and leave the slow kids behind, or they had to spend day after day explaining the same concept over and over again

This isn't really related, but I had to tell a story (I want to tell one too! )

In my senior year of high school, I was in an AP (college level) English class. One of the few stimulating classes I took during high school. Anyway, it was the end of the year, and because we had read and discussed Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," our teacher showed us "Apocalypse Now" and we would talk about it as we went through the film.

So one day we finally watch the last portion of the film, the lights go on, and a cheerleader-type raises her hand.

"Mr Sherrett? Who is this Charlie that they keep talking about??"

so you're either conflating those two things, or your teacher taught you rules combined together for common happenstances.

No... I think it's just that it has been more than 40 years since I learned it, and my memory just isn't what it used to be.

tanstaafl.

However, overall I'd say that our educational system has devolved into nothing more than daycare.

Well, that states the problem rather succinctly. How about a solution?

One of the greatest things about American Education also plants the seeds for its downfall, and that is, everybody is entitled to a free education through the 12th grade. Unfortunately, whoever makes the "rules" went (IMHO) a step too far and decided that not only is everybody entitled, but they are required to partake of this education, at least through the age of 16. (Perhaps that varies from state to state?)

My solution is this: at birth, everybody gets a "certificate" or whatever, good for life, for a 12-year (13 with Kindergarten) public school education, but nobody is required to use it. Think what classrooms and teachers would be like if everybody was in the room because they wanted to be there!

The people who drop out of school will eventually find out on their own how hard it is to get through life without an education, and would be able to resume their education whenever they had reached sufficient maturity to realize they needed it. Imagine a class full of 30-year-old seventh graders...

Classes would still have to be taught at the level of the lowest common denominator; but that level would be significantly higher than it is now with classes filled with disruptive miscreants who not only don't want to be there, but shouldn't be there.

tanstaafl.

Oh god, that just wouldn't work. I can just see a third of our population that can't read, write, or add. Heloooo eighteenth century. Not to mention that we'd have to pay their way through life.

Oh wait, I guess we already do.