What are they teaching my kids???

[Denny]

"hotdish". Not "hot dish"~~~~We've been over this before.

you'd think that I'd remember that ..... wouldn't ya?

I don't miss that part of the country that much. No, mostly climate issues.

Tater tots I've mixed feelings about. I was one of the few things that the first wife had almost even odds at.

[Cubitt]

I began to give up when "impact" became a verb.

I really gave up when several department stores in my area began to feature a "Mens" department (nice big sign). I guess I should have been glad to know that's where the mens go. Oh, and there's also MENSWEAR. I tend to read that one as "Men swear," but that's just me.

Don't even get me started on "10 items or less."

And have you thought about the fact that in politics, we need more women candidates? I don't know about the female ones.

Sigh.

[emmline]

This is a link (which may or may not work) to a Stephen Fry podcast on "the beauty of "incorrect" language and the stupid futility of linguistic pedantry."

It's very interesting. This is not to say I never behave pedantically, but this other side of the coin has some excellent points.

Oops...a better, more direct link which might require downloading. Nuisance. But interesting.

[jim stone]

Taught university for many years. The chief problem for graduating seniors is functional illiteracy.
A significant minority cannot write a grammatical English sentence. They are graduated anyway
cause the universities need the tuition. Guess what one of the illiterates' favorite majors is?

A teacher-competency test was given the graduating seniors in Education at a local university. All
failed. The test was published on the front page of the Times Picayune. Multiple choice
questions about what the above paragraph had said. Students couldn't read.

Once they are hired as teachers the unions protect them.

Teacher union states, there are none in the south, have a higher rate of firings than non-union states.

Your first claim is inaccurate (and I don't see the relevance of your second) .
I don't know about the whole south (a very quick check finds teachers unions
in Mississippi and Georgia) but teachers where I worked
are unionized. For example, after the graduating seniors in education in New Orleans all failed
a teacher competency test, it was realized that many teachers in Louisiana schools
are probably illiterate (coming from the same institutions). So there was a major move
to have teacher competency tests given to all teachers, which the Louisiana union successfully
resisted--as unions have done successfully elsewhere.

The point is that large numbers of graduating seniors from universities in our country are illiterate.
They often go into education, one of the least demanding majors. So
many teachers are illiterate or marginally literate. Once they are hired, the measures
that would get them out of there are widely resisted successfully by unions.

Just to be clear, the unions protect illiterate teachers from being fired for illiteracy
by fighting the testing that would find them. This is consistent with more teachers being
fired in union states than elsewhere, if that's the case. That may not have much to
do with either literacy or unions.

[Lambchop]

always on about tater tots & hot dish recipes, he is.....

"hotdish". Not "hot dish"~~~~We've been over this before.

He could have been talking about me, you know . . .

Hastily edited to add: err, about me and my cookbook . . . and about Emmline and Izzarina and their cookbooks . . .

[dwest]

Your first claim is inaccurate (and I don't see the relevance of your second) .
I don't know about the whole south (a very quick check finds teachers unions
in Mississippi and Georgia) but teachers where I worked
are unionized.

In the south collective bargaining for teachers is almost non-existent, Unions and education associations exist but they have little power. Tenure is provided by the school systems and even with that teachers' contracts are renewed on a year to year basis, sometimes just weeks before the new sessions start. Southern schools are failing at just as high a rate as "unionized" schools in other parts of the country.

[Nanohedron]

always on about tater tots & hot dish recipes, he is.....

"hotdish". Not "hot dish"~~~~We've been over this before.

He could have been talking about me, you know . . .

Hastily edited to add: err, about me and my cookbook . . . and about Emmline and Izzarina and their cookbooks . . .

Cookbooks? You have cookbooks with hotdish recipes? You have no idea how utterly cool that makes you. But just to let you know, if your cookbooks spell it "hot dish", it's a dead giveaway that the writer was a dilettante, an outsider, a mere compiler of curious if nevertheless charming quainteries, a player-at-hotdish, not one of the True Flock. Which isn't to say the recipes aren't reliable: it's pretty hard to get a can of cream of mushroom soup, cooked crumbled hamburger, and tater tots wrong. Just make sure it's in a rectangular baking dish. Please.

[Denny]

He could have been talking about me, you know . . .

pretty much ruled that out, didn't he

[Nanohedron]

He could have been talking about me, you know . . .

pretty much ruled that out, didn't he

Whoa, excuse me?? YOU'RE the one who wrote "he" earlier in a post referential to MINE, Denny. "He". Not "she", not "it", not "they", nor some other nongendered catchall pronoun lacking to date in English. And what other guy around here is to the subject like a shark is to chum? I ask you.

If you guys want to succceed at getting your jollies off of me, at least do me the honor of coming properly armed - which means, by the way, that you might also want to bone up on your own posts. Just in case, like.

[Denny]

I think that yer mashing yer tots....

There was a Major named hot somethin'
and a Lieutenant named Dish....

[Nanohedron]

There was a Major named hot somethin'
and a Lieutenant named Dish....

And Rachel Ray declared
The result was "delish".

[Denny]

Through early morning fog I see
visions of the things to be
the pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see...

[jim stone]

Your first claim is inaccurate (and I don't see the relevance of your second) .
I don't know about the whole south (a very quick check finds teachers unions
in Mississippi and Georgia) but teachers where I worked
are unionized.

In the south collective bargaining for teachers is almost non-existent, Unions and education associations exist but they have little power. Tenure is provided by the school systems and even with that teachers' contracts are renewed on a year to year basis, sometimes just weeks before the new sessions start. Southern schools are failing at just as high a rate as "unionized" schools in other parts of the country.

Perhaps, and what I said could still be true. Teachers unions in Louisiana have little power, on your account.
Suppose you are right. They still have enough power to successfully resist teacher competency tests meant to discover illiterate teachers. Did it in Louisiana. Weak Southern unions have THAT much power, anyhow. The comparison you
need is failure rates tween Southern public schools and Southern private schools. Good luck with that.

[dwest]

Your first claim is inaccurate (and I don't see the relevance of your second) .
I don't know about the whole south (a very quick check finds teachers unions
in Mississippi and Georgia) but teachers where I worked
are unionized.

In the south collective bargaining for teachers is almost non-existent, Unions and education associations exist but they have little power. Tenure is provided by the school systems and even with that teachers' contracts are renewed on a year to year basis, sometimes just weeks before the new sessions start. Southern schools are failing at just as high a rate as "unionized" schools in other parts of the country.

Perhaps, and what I said could still be true. Teachers unions in Louisiana have little power, on your account.
Suppose you are right. They still have enough power to successfully resist teacher competency tests meant to discover illiterate teachers. Did it in Louisiana. Weak Southern unions have THAT much power, anyhow. The comparison you
need is failure rates tween Southern public schools and Southern private schools. Good luck with that.

They have have credit unions fer sure. The other union thing is an old canard, it's a shame it's still being bandied about, but it gets a lot of traction in some circles

[jim stone]

No, it’s no canard. I was teaching in Louisiana when the unions successfully fought teacher competency testing after it was discovered that most graduating education majors in local universities were illiterate. The union’s battle against the testing was public. I watched it go down.

These events happened in the 90s. The issue remains a live one. Here’s the concluding paragraph of a recent entry from a blog by Jeff Sadow, an associate professor of political science at the University of Lousiana at Shreveport.
He is writing about the teacher's union in Louisiana.

'10.9.09

Continued obstinacy in the face of these facts proves teachers’ union would rather sacrifice quality education in favor of excising the greatest amount of resources from taxpayers for the least amount of quality work. It also lays bare that their representatives can’t think critically well about education issues. This and the fact they have opposed consistently the idea of regular subject area merit testing of teachers leads one to believe that shielding intellectually incompetent teachers from termination has become the main impact that unions have on the quality of education.'

http://jeffsadow.blogspot.com/2009/09/r ... dress.html