Jan 15 2009
Your great you are write
“Your great you are write.”
It pained me just to type that out.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to have been painful for one of my online students to write. That little gem was part of a class discussion. The student in question was trying to give credit to another student for the second student’s contribution to the discussion. The first student, however, apparently needs to go back to the second grade and figure out homonyms.
Even more unfortunately, this student is not alone. I have been teaching college composition classes for five years now, and mistakes like these are very common. They are more blatantly obvious in an online classroom, where every bit of communication is written, but when I recieve papers with text-speak, wrong words, and sentence fragments galore, something is horribly, horribly wrong with the state of higher education.
These are not remedial developmental classes. These are college-level composition classes for students who either tested high enough to be in a standard Comp 101 or passed a developmental course previously. You’d never know it by the quality of the writing I get. For that matter, you wouldn’t know that some of these students passed the second grade.
The Geek assures me I am not alone in my thinking. He deals with people like this as he does his Geek things. When I worked at Big Green Tractor Company, I was offically an IT analyst and unoffically the IT department proofreader. At least many of my colleages there had the excuse of being non-native English speakers.
My students were, mostly, born and raised in the United States, speaking some form of English at home. They were educated in English speaking schools, with a few exceptions. And yet, my nine-year-old nephew knows more about nouns and verbs than my college freshmen do. What on earth is wrong with our educational system today?
