Yes, I noticed teaching in Austria that
Austrian high school grads could write
English better than most American
college grads.
The idea of sending everybody to college
is supposed to uplift the populace,
but maybe the chief effect is to
drag down the universities and
colleges. Also I think a lot of universities
invested in a lot of physical plant
after WWII, and so it became necessary
to have and keep lots of students to get the
tuition to survive. Further, state legislatures
keep cutting funding. The result is an increasing
need to dumb down so as to keep students.
As universities are accepting illiterates
and passing them along and graduating them,
there’s less incentive for highschools and
grade schools to face the fact that they
aren’t teaching literacy. Of course one
of the most popular majors for illiterate
students in college is education, because
the demands are meager, so the situation
is self perpetuating.
I think for much of the country we
don’t have higher education any more.
Junior colleges, I’ve taught in some, are
generally worse. I’ve had lots of students
enter my courses at university from
junior college, take the first exam,
and get a 10 out of 100.
When I first started teaching intro courses,
the first few weeks were kind of interesting.
People appeared interested, they laughed
at the jokes, I gave the first exam,
and about half the papers came back
with only the student’s name on it. Best
A PHD just for a manufacturing job?
No, wait, I think they call a fry cook job a small business now. Or is it a corporation? No, wait, then no one at all would ever pay any taxes.
Right. When sputnik went up the gov started pouring
money into education. Everybody was supposed
to go to university. Lots of building were built,
faculty hired. Adminstrations over capitalized.
Then the government cut back
funding; state legislatures have steadily done
this too. The universities increasingly had to get
money from tuition. To do that you need students,
and you need to keep em. The solution:
dumb down. Where you need money,
standards must fall. At my university
we had nine mid year budget crises
in a row.
Every so often I meet someone who I just have to tell about my ‘carbon allergy’, along the lines of:
“You know how some people are allergic to peanuts or dairy products? Well you know how sometimes you’re grilling meat and it burns a bit, that black bit is carbon, and to me it’s deadly dangerous. If I eat one little bit of that carbon, I have major breathing problems, and have to get to the hospital within 10 minutes or I’ll probably die. And in fact, though the carbon on charrred meat is most dangerous, I have to watch out for carbon in other foods too, just in case.”
It’s quite hard telling this with a straight face, but I’ve managed it a few times now, and some people definitely believed it!
Did it really take you 2 years to come up with a response?
Wait, I know… you’re trying to point out that this thread should have
been moved to the Pub long ago. Well done. Give Nano something
with which to practice.
Sorry, was posting late at night ended up on the thread due to link from the Dihydrogen monoxide thread. I totally forgot that I was reading an old thread. No more posting before 4AM for the rest of the day.
I see the point, but I don’t have a problem with the lyric. It seems very effective.
A light year is a measure of distance, based on how far light travels in a given interval of time. The image the lyric creates is that of two people who began moving apart at a very high velocity a long time ago and are now separated by a great distance. If you were driving a car, you might say, “We passed a rest stop a couple of miles ago.” That might be somewhat idiomatic, but I don’t see anything wrong with it.
You’d be amazed at how many people believe they are “allergic” to things just such as this - or even stranger. Working in an allergy clinic for 14 years, I’ve heard some really bizarre tales of “allergies.” It doesn’t surprise me that many people would believe you.
In College (Engineering School) we took the courses Statics and Dynamics, the former studying bridges, buildings, stress and strain on stationary objects, and the latter being objects in motion. A year or two after I graduated they dropped the Dynamics requirement for all undergraduates in the interest of dumbing down the curriculum. The joke spread to other Engineering Schools that XYZ College teaches its engineering students how things stay put, but not how they move. A little embarrassing.
He’s drunk with new-found power. Just wait till he gets accussed of being a right-wing old boy…
Sigh. I checked out this thread, thinking it new and saw Zub’s name. Though we crossed swords on occasion, I got a bit excited thinking he had come back…He always had an interesting item to add to the general wisecrackery.
