I Didn't Know What To Say!
- Thread starter Colin Phillips
- Start date
Shadow Leader
At the Start
- Joined
- Nov 9, 2003
- Messages
- 9,884
DO, I was a science student!!!!
I see your point but I went to a comp, a fairly rough one at that - jeez, one day we found a student hanging from a tree in the sports field as he wanted to make sure he was found at school!
I still feel however that educational standards are slipping enormously.
I see your point but I went to a comp, a fairly rough one at that - jeez, one day we found a student hanging from a tree in the sports field as he wanted to make sure he was found at school!
I still feel however that educational standards are slipping enormously.
Desert Orchid
Senior Jockey
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
- Messages
- 25,024
:laughing:
The thought of you studying 'free radicals' had me in stitches! Wasn't sure if it was a description or a petition
I'm not totally unsympathetic to Shadz on this one.
At Uni I was a serial non-attender of lectures (couldn't see the point in them and still don't). Every term the registrar would send a letter back to my LEA suggesting they consider withdrawing my grant, and every term the LEA requested my results, but since I was hitting first class grades, it caused a bit of difficulty for them. What it did mask is that I chose to work and learn in an environment outside of that prescribed by convention. In actual fact it meant a lot of hard work which wasn't always visible, but it was certainly conducted to a greater level of interogation than anything that involved sitting in room blindly copying down word for word verbatim what was being spouted from the front, without so much as a pause for thought and consideration.
Essentially you were dealing with an unchallenging, convoluted and thoroughly inefficient way of transferring information from one person to many. Unfortunately the people repsonsible for perpetuating this out-dated method, are products of the same system that's served them so well, so never seek to challenge it. The result is nothing more helpful then reproduction in one's own image.
They even suggested awarding a 1% mark in each module for every lecture you attended
Suffice to say, being more resourceful than most, I sent a space hopper along as my proxy (one of the orange ones with a permanently inane grin on its face) it caused amusement amongst most of the lecturing staff who could see the subtle protest element in it, in so much as my space hopper could be close to getting a third class degree at the end of a year. The University management weren't quite so accommodating.
Quite tellingly for me, I went to Uni as a so called mature student (though only in my mid 20's). I wasn't aware of it until half way through the term, but I'd inadvertantly joined the first GCSE intake, and in this respect I have to agree with Dom, they really weren't very clever as a group. After successfully threatening the Uni with legal action, I was able to skip a year, and join the last 'O'- level generation. I estimate they were about 20% better. The GCSE kids by contrast worked harder. I was under the impression that having been educated beyond their natural intelligence, they were seeking to compensate for their comparative lack of intelligence and understanding, through work ethic, which is laudible. Unfortunately, they frequently turned this into a memory recall exercise though, and confused the two things.
A lecturer of mine lamented that there was nothing more depressing for him to give a lecture in September, and find his words being reproduced months later word for word verbatim without a modicom of thought or analysis.
"You can't fail them" he said "They're right"... "But you can only give them a 2:2 it's depressing, they haven't demonstrated thought or understanding"
My own Mother (a teacher) gave her Maths class an 'O' Level paper recently. This should translate of course, as unlike other areas of the education system, Maths doesn't really change. It was an experiement the Department wanted to try. The result was that the whole year were consistantly 25% lower on the 'O' Level paper than they were on the GCSE equivilant.
I recently bemoaned a student placement who we had working with us (22 year old Girl at De Montfort University) we gave her blank maps of Europe and Africa and asked her identify countries. It doesn't prove intelligence I conceed, but there's an issue about general knowledge and all roundedness. She identified Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Holland eventually once she swithced them. Norway she identified as Sweden and then gave up. In Africa she managed just South Africa, and then gave up; after having identified Saudi Arabia as Egypt.
As regards parents, I think there's an altogether different dynamic here in increasingly a lot of cases. There's a cohort coming through, with a sizeable minority amongst them, who basically can't pass on educational stimulation to their children, and can't supply the knowledge and explanations that an enquiring mind wants. The tragedy of this, is that the parent often wants to, but just doesn't have the knowledge to pass on. My God I even got a phone call recently late at night asking me "what causes thunder to go bang?". I was more than happy to oblige, and felt it was quite sad. The will was there but the deficit in knowledge was yawning
At Uni I was a serial non-attender of lectures (couldn't see the point in them and still don't). Every term the registrar would send a letter back to my LEA suggesting they consider withdrawing my grant, and every term the LEA requested my results, but since I was hitting first class grades, it caused a bit of difficulty for them. What it did mask is that I chose to work and learn in an environment outside of that prescribed by convention. In actual fact it meant a lot of hard work which wasn't always visible, but it was certainly conducted to a greater level of interogation than anything that involved sitting in room blindly copying down word for word verbatim what was being spouted from the front, without so much as a pause for thought and consideration.
Essentially you were dealing with an unchallenging, convoluted and thoroughly inefficient way of transferring information from one person to many. Unfortunately the people repsonsible for perpetuating this out-dated method, are products of the same system that's served them so well, so never seek to challenge it. The result is nothing more helpful then reproduction in one's own image.
They even suggested awarding a 1% mark in each module for every lecture you attended
Suffice to say, being more resourceful than most, I sent a space hopper along as my proxy (one of the orange ones with a permanently inane grin on its face) it caused amusement amongst most of the lecturing staff who could see the subtle protest element in it, in so much as my space hopper could be close to getting a third class degree at the end of a year. The University management weren't quite so accommodating.Quite tellingly for me, I went to Uni as a so called mature student (though only in my mid 20's). I wasn't aware of it until half way through the term, but I'd inadvertantly joined the first GCSE intake, and in this respect I have to agree with Dom, they really weren't very clever as a group. After successfully threatening the Uni with legal action, I was able to skip a year, and join the last 'O'- level generation. I estimate they were about 20% better. The GCSE kids by contrast worked harder. I was under the impression that having been educated beyond their natural intelligence, they were seeking to compensate for their comparative lack of intelligence and understanding, through work ethic, which is laudible. Unfortunately, they frequently turned this into a memory recall exercise though, and confused the two things.
A lecturer of mine lamented that there was nothing more depressing for him to give a lecture in September, and find his words being reproduced months later word for word verbatim without a modicom of thought or analysis.
"You can't fail them" he said "They're right"... "But you can only give them a 2:2 it's depressing, they haven't demonstrated thought or understanding"
My own Mother (a teacher) gave her Maths class an 'O' Level paper recently. This should translate of course, as unlike other areas of the education system, Maths doesn't really change. It was an experiement the Department wanted to try. The result was that the whole year were consistantly 25% lower on the 'O' Level paper than they were on the GCSE equivilant.
I recently bemoaned a student placement who we had working with us (22 year old Girl at De Montfort University) we gave her blank maps of Europe and Africa and asked her identify countries. It doesn't prove intelligence I conceed, but there's an issue about general knowledge and all roundedness. She identified Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Holland eventually once she swithced them. Norway she identified as Sweden and then gave up. In Africa she managed just South Africa, and then gave up; after having identified Saudi Arabia as Egypt.
As regards parents, I think there's an altogether different dynamic here in increasingly a lot of cases. There's a cohort coming through, with a sizeable minority amongst them, who basically can't pass on educational stimulation to their children, and can't supply the knowledge and explanations that an enquiring mind wants. The tragedy of this, is that the parent often wants to, but just doesn't have the knowledge to pass on. My God I even got a phone call recently late at night asking me "what causes thunder to go bang?". I was more than happy to oblige, and felt it was quite sad. The will was there but the deficit in knowledge was yawning
Dumbing down's been going on for much longer than we think. A close friend of mine has been Senior Lecturer in English at Bristol for many years [he'd be Professor by now but being also Admissions Tutor and holding various other admin roles he never has time to publish!]
He was complaing back in the late 70s that standards of written English were plummeting; he showed me some of the admission forms where prosepctive students had to write a piece aobut themselves. Some of them - almost all from state schools - were really abysmal: no grasp of grammar, and consequently the students had no means of expressing themselves accurately. Forget spelling and punctuation. He had to instigate a 1-term course for most First Year students to teach them the basics of the English language - and this for English students! [no wonder we Brits find it impossible to learn a foreign language].
If you can't use language competently, you can't THINK, ie reason.
The sad consequence of the dumbing down is that most students at Bristol and comparable universities [ie Russell Group] now come from private schools. This chasm has according to him become steadily worse. He also remarked many years ago that only about 5% of the applicants he was getting would have even got to interview in our own day [I went up in 1965]. Most of my contemporaries at Bristol came from Grammar Schools, and there was a very wide social mix, with a good sprinkling of foreigners and of mature students.
My friend also tells me that his job has become totally soul destroying since most students now take everything off the net. Often he can tell because the essays he gets given change style dramatically within themselves - if he cuts a piece of text and pastes it into Google the original usually comes up! But most tutors apparently can't be bothered to check this kind of thing; they just get their paycheck [totally devalued as it is, who could blame them?] and close their eyes to all the cheating. And as most degrees are now given principally on coursework modules, lazy students get away with it. How do you think all those websites selling essays make their money?
Many current degrees are therefore worthless - we have John Major to thank for this nonsense; he left school at 15 iirc. I agree with Songsheet, what has happened to Further Ed in the last 20 years thoroughly debases the degree system, and esp those degrees obtained by us oldies when getting a BA really meant something. It's not the same everywhere though - I looked at the exam papers of my lecturer friend's daughter who got a First in English at Oxford four years ago - fiendishly difficult :dork:
He was complaing back in the late 70s that standards of written English were plummeting; he showed me some of the admission forms where prosepctive students had to write a piece aobut themselves. Some of them - almost all from state schools - were really abysmal: no grasp of grammar, and consequently the students had no means of expressing themselves accurately. Forget spelling and punctuation. He had to instigate a 1-term course for most First Year students to teach them the basics of the English language - and this for English students! [no wonder we Brits find it impossible to learn a foreign language].
If you can't use language competently, you can't THINK, ie reason.
The sad consequence of the dumbing down is that most students at Bristol and comparable universities [ie Russell Group] now come from private schools. This chasm has according to him become steadily worse. He also remarked many years ago that only about 5% of the applicants he was getting would have even got to interview in our own day [I went up in 1965]. Most of my contemporaries at Bristol came from Grammar Schools, and there was a very wide social mix, with a good sprinkling of foreigners and of mature students.
My friend also tells me that his job has become totally soul destroying since most students now take everything off the net. Often he can tell because the essays he gets given change style dramatically within themselves - if he cuts a piece of text and pastes it into Google the original usually comes up! But most tutors apparently can't be bothered to check this kind of thing; they just get their paycheck [totally devalued as it is, who could blame them?] and close their eyes to all the cheating. And as most degrees are now given principally on coursework modules, lazy students get away with it. How do you think all those websites selling essays make their money?
Many current degrees are therefore worthless - we have John Major to thank for this nonsense; he left school at 15 iirc. I agree with Songsheet, what has happened to Further Ed in the last 20 years thoroughly debases the degree system, and esp those degrees obtained by us oldies when getting a BA really meant something. It's not the same everywhere though - I looked at the exam papers of my lecturer friend's daughter who got a First in English at Oxford four years ago - fiendishly difficult :dork:
Shadow Leader
At the Start
- Joined
- Nov 9, 2003
- Messages
- 9,884
More authority? I am unable to work out in my tiny little brain that people around me are wholly incapable of spelling, using grammar, setting out a letter, etc etc? Some of the letters I receive make me cringe - people are actually being employed with such poor literary standards as secretaries?? It beggars belief! Surely if these people had been educated adequately this wouldn't be such a widespread problem?
I am quite happy judging things for myself and coming up with my own thought processes through watching society and the people I come across on a daily basis rather than being told what to think though so no, teecher, I won't keep quiet on your say-so!
Desert Orchid
Senior Jockey
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
- Messages
- 25,024
I fail to see the logic in that remark.
Over 20 years ago this was put together by a 3rd-level historian. the entire thing is composed of lines from student exams and essays submitted in two very good Canadian universities. Every academic I know has seen work as poor (though probably not as amusing) as this.
A Student's History of Europe: The Middle Ages to the Renaissance
"History, as we know, is always bias, because human beings have to be studied by other human beings, not by independent observers of another species.
During the Middle Ages, everybody was middle aged. Church and state were co-operatic. Middle Evil society was made up of monks, lords, and surfs.
It is unfortunate that we do not have a medievel European laid out on a table before us, ready for dissection. After a revival of infantile commerce slowly creeped into Europe, merchants appeared. Some were sitters and some were drifters. They roamed from town to town exposing themselves and organized big fairies in the countryside. Mideval people were violent. Murder during this period was nothing. Everybody killed someone. England fought numerously for land in France and ended up winning and losing. The Crusades were a series of military expaditions made by Christians seeking to free the holy land (the 'Home Town' of
Christ) from the Islams.
In the 1400 hundreds most Englishmen were perpendicular. A class of yeowls arose. Finally, Europe caught the Black Death. The bubonic plague is a social disease in the sense that it can be transmitted by intercourse and other etceteras. It was spread from port to port by inflected rats. Victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks.
The plague also helped the emergance of the English language as the national language of England, France, and Italy.
The Middle Ages slimpared to a halt. The renasence bolted in from the blue. Life reeked with joy. Italy became robust, and more individuals felt the value of their human beings. Italy, of course, was much closer to the rest of the world, thanks to nothern Europe. Man was determined to civilise himself and his brothers, even if heads had to roll! It became sheik to be educated. Art was on a more associated level. Europe was full of incredable churches with great art bulging out their doors.
Renaissance merchants were beautiful and almost lifelike.
The Reformnation happened when German nobles resented the idea that tithes were going to Papal France or the Pope thus enriching Catholic coiffures. Traditions had become oppressive so they too were crushed in the wake of man's quest for resurrection above the not-just-social beast he had become. An angry Martin Luther nailed 95 theocrats to a church door. Theologically, Luthar was into reorientation mutation. Calvinism was the most convenient religion since the days of the ancients.
Anabaptist services tended to be migratory. The Popes, of course, were usually Catholic. Monks went right on seeing themselves as worms. The last Jesuit priest died in the 19th century. "
It does go on and gets better. It's called "Life Reeked with Joy".
So to clarify, SL, you know more about the current education standards than teachers? Maybe you just need to move to a more educated area than you are at the moment if everyone you come across on a daily basis has poor standards of grammar and education. At no point do I say that you know nothing, merely that teachers have a better grasp of the facts. If the debate were about race riding, you would claim a better knowledge base than me due to experience, and you would be right, even though I also have 2 eyes and can observe things.
Shadow Leader
At the Start
- Joined
- Nov 9, 2003
- Messages
- 9,884
I'm sure that one doesn't have to be a teacher to be qualified to notice slipping standards of education in members of the general public. Still, there's no point going around in circles which is all that seems to be happening at the moment in this debate!