Microblog Memes

Wow you guys had to use the hill? That's rough.

I've had horrible teachers, but mostly because they were abusive, and terrible at teaching. Even those horrible teachers never told me I wouldn't amount to anything without appending the statement with "if you don't apply yourself".

Yeah some teachers are legitimately awful. I had one in fourth grade that was extremely disrespectful to her students, screaming at them and publicly humiliating ones that did poorly on tests or had trouble reading to the class. Acted the polar opposite when other faculty were in the room doing observation reviews.

I had this teacher who was openly cruel to me in front of my classmates. She didn't even try to hide her disdain. Many years later my father told me she had a talk with him and told him: "I'd love to fail him but I can't because he keeps scoring 10 in every exam." So that was the reason, I never did my homework, I was always distracting my classmates but I always passed exams with a 10.

I had a real cunt of a math teacher in 6th grade, he taught his subject matter well but was just a bastard of a human being; I no longer have several mementos of my life (was an air force brat) because he confiscated them, and would be pedantic about how you asked to get things back (may i vs can i BS); eventually he would just dispose of things.

Yes, I'd much rather have my tax dollars going toward that than another air superiority fighter that: A. Doesn't work and B. Wouldn't be used because most of our military engagements are against groups without air forces.

Prioritize reading of fiction. We put too much emphasis on reading for education, but reading can be a great escape too.

People need escape mechanisms. Reading fiction is an escape and it makes people more literate and more articulate.

Educating the low level stuff is just as important as the high level stuff. And by low level stuff, I mean the ability to form coherent sentences, and arrange those into paragraphs.

Just running tons and tons of text through the brain helps with this. My Spanish verb conjugation, for example, got much better when I started reading Spanish literature. Because a good story eventually covers all the bases of all the tenses for conjugation, many many times. It’s so much more effective than a textbook on conjugation.

We learn by examples. Especially language. The best way to learn language is unconsciously, as a side effect of trying to communicate. A good story grips the reader’s conscious mind on the plot, allowing the absorption of the linguistic rules to be absorbed unconsciously.

We don’t have enough respect for fiction. We think people need to read about physics or history to get smarter. No. They can read about an adventure, and get smarter. Just like a person can play soccer and get more skilled. Drills are fine, but just playing the game makes you better too, and it’s so much more engaging than doing drills.

Huh? What are those shapes?

Makes sense. I was asking because the links were talking about the English language. But considering that this is the working language, it doesn't really matter in the end if the person is a native speaker or not. If they can't hold a basic conversation or read simple instructions, it makes their life harder no matter what.