In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
It is interesting to compare the experiences of Ms. L to various people in their 40s returning to school when I was in undergrad. They too had difficulty with very basic (to us youngsters, anyway) methods of computer use. Many viewed computers with either outright terror or blatant suspicion.
I have often thought of volunteering my time to a college or tech school locally to teach computer-illiterate people the basics of computer use. It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people.
SIMPLE!!!??? You clearly didn't teach your parents to use computers. Teaching people how to use computers is one of the more challenging and frustrating things I have yet to do. Besides perhaps math, computers baffle more adults than anything I can imagine. I used to have 2 hours phone calls with my mom trying to "get her document back". She had just clicked another window and her word doc was behind it. 2 hours later she accidently clicked the word doc again and it came forward. Teaching the computer illiterate is a can of worms I wouldn't open without some serious friends and some serious beer.
Me: You mean the desktop?
Mom: I don't know. The way it was.
Me: Is it this? (shows her the desktop)
Mom: No. It was all black.
Me: You mean off? (shuts computer down)
Mom: Yes. Thank you.
My Mom's a preschool teacher, and I will rely heavily on her wisdom when I have kids, seeing as I don't know jack about 3 year olds.
Me in 7 years: Mom, my kid won't eat his dinner. I think I got a broken one.
We all have our own useful areas of knowledge.
I complain to my folks about what I see as major character problems in my little one, only to have my parents smile knowingly (I think they think its justice of some sort). The mention something about that being "familiar" behavior they saw once upon a time ;)
And I taught my mother from basic computer illiteracy into practically a power user (well, a relative power user: email and surfing and transferring images from her digital camera. she's the envy of all her friends, at least...).
The biggest hurdle was getting her to believe me that no matter what she did, she couldn't possibly harm the computer beyond my ability to repair it. I think a lot of people unfamiliar with computers think that it is very easy to irreparably damage them. It kind of discourages taking risks and trying to solve problems on your own. Once I made it clear that she could (and should) do whatever she wanted without fear, she picked it up extremely rapidly.
We (younger people) have an advantage in that we're used to pretty much everything being software driven, so we know that if we screw up our computer, phone or DVD player we can just pull the plug or the battery. We're also used to the idea that not every device will behave the same way to achieve the same function. We press "send" to "send" a call, but not to send an SMS message, even though the latter is standard usage and the former is not, but we don't care because we know that's how the UI works. And, we know that we'll have to keep learning new UIs as we get older. Older people don't have a problem dialing nine for an outside line, even though at home they just pick up the receiver, because they probably learned it in their 20s.
We are so far away from an actually usable interface it's disgusting.
Tech interfaces are usable -- they're just not intuitive to those who didn't grow up using computers. Ironically, part of the problem is that the metaphors and shortcuts that some interfaces use in an attempt to make things easier end up make things more confusing:
- Operating systems: "Why is the trashcan on my desktop?"
- Macs: "If I want to eject the CD, I'm supposed to throw it away in the trashcan?"
- Cell phones: "So you're saying I have to hold down the off button if I want to turn the phone on?"
So yeah, we do have a long, long way to go.
Cellphones on the other hand are one of the most widely distributed electronic devices in the world, and they're clearly designed for anyone to use. It's certainly the designer's prerogative to assume the user will have a certain level of training and familiarity with it (or will take the time to learn it), but my argument is that in some cases a designer who goes the extra mile and makes a truly intuitive device has the opportunity to capture a much larger user base.
You could say that's what blogger did -- there were many ways to build a blog before, but Evan Williams and co. made it much easier to launch and maintain one, and that paid off for them.
Do you not perhaps think that correlation is not causation? Maybe "dropping out of the education system early" is in fact a more significant data point than being 40? I'm 32 and if things stay as they are, in 10 years I'll have real trouble changing jobs in this industry. The current crop of geeks are in for a nasty surprise if they think they'll be a hot commodity forever.
If you do this enough, you will inevitably come up against a real challenge. One of my students could not even double-click. She would raise her hand to hover a couple of inches above the mouse, then stab down with her finger twice. Not only was this too slow to register as a double click, she invariably moved the mouse. with each downward stab of her finger. I would show her the right way to do it, but she would always devolve to her old behavior.
It was in my first year of university. I knew the course and knew the material but couldn't have been arsed to put together a paper which adequately addressed the subject.
The comments the professor wrote were scathing and it was a wonderful full slap on the face that I'd better get my act together and actually deliver what was expected of me if I ever wanted to accomplish something of value.
I did. Thanks for that 'F'.
Now, it was the papers I never turned in that hurt me the most :)
All that's "expected" of students anymore is a pulse, AFAICT.
One week later, I became a math major and I've never looked back.
I honestly had only used the word because I thought it was cool to pronounce "-digm".
Or put in other words; I didn't think there were enough jobs available that didn't require a minimum of college-level skills. A checkout clerk could obviously make do, but I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains to grasp some abstract literary concepts.
And other questions arise: Isn't academic aptitude strongly correlated with ability to succeed in the world at large after all? You'd have a hard time convincing me that most people who can't comment intelligently on 'The Wizard of Oz' are fit do be much more than corporate monkeys. At one level or the other, there is a major problem here - either the educational system is a massive failure, or the rest of us are stupid to assume that everybody has to be particularly intelligent.
Try reading the comments on youtube.
I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains to grasp some abstract literary concepts.
A car mechanic has enough brains to grasp some pretty complicated mechanical concepts, but for whatever reason he can quite easily fail to grasp a simple literary concept no matter how well it's explained. In the same way, I'm sure I can find you plenty of professors of English who are incapable of grasping how an engine works. In both cases, I'm not sure whether they're genuinely incapable, or whether they just have psychological barricades set up which lead them to think that this kind of knowledge is "beneath" them.
You'd have a hard time convincing me that most people who can't comment intelligently on 'The Wizard of Oz' are fit do be much more than corporate monkeys.
Most people out there probably just don't think that commenting intelligently on The Wizard of Oz is a worthwhile thing to do.
I'm convinced that this is the bulk of the problem.
Perhaps I'm still an idealist, but I have always believed that almost anyone can learn almost anything.
Ever think of asking a parent how many times they'd let their baby fall before they gave up teaching him to walk? They'd look at you like you're from another planet. They'd probably answer, "He'll keep trying and falling until he walks."
Think how far ahead everyone would be if all teachers were like parents of one-year-olds.
With that in mind, if you could teach many "average laymen" to grasp advanced physics, I really wouldn't be all that surprised. Of course, there is something to be said for raw talent, lots of which remains hidden because of many factors. The power of human capability never ceases to amaze me, even under the most difficult circumstances.
But if you want to criticize what they're saying, that's a bit different.
It's not that hard to learn decent grammar, especially with the resources available to those with Internet access. The fact that these kids can hammer out imbecilic English sentences doesn't impress me.
Yes. 21-23%. Or, higher, depending on how you count.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy
I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word.
Correct again. The wikipedia article notes the high correlation of illiteracy to delinquency and crime.
However, a counterexample. One of my first programming jobs was to create a data entry terminal in an industrial setting, replacing the giant paper sheets they used to fill out. When it was ready I beta-tested it on selected people from each shift. The interface was super simple, it just asked you a series of questions and you typed in the numbers -- I figured the guys in the plant would at least know how to deal with ATMs, so that was my metaphor. And it worked well.
The best foreman in the plant brought a friend along -- I shrugged and let them take the test together. He interacted with it in a really weird way and required multiple repeats of the entire session before he understood it. I only realized later that he was illiterate. And, let me just restate: best foreman in the whole plant. He knew what numbers were, and he'd trained himself to fill out the correct numbers in the correct spots on the paper sheet.
So that's when I added big icons and pictures to each screen, diagramming what bit of data we wanted at each stage.
For some reason your story reminded me of Captain Bill Eddy, television pioneer of the 1930s and 40s. Here he is in his own words (from one of my favorite books: The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920 - 1961):
"I started losing my hearing as a kid and was deaf when I entered the Navy, but I had learned to read lips, so every time they put me through the audio tests, they said I had perfect hearing. With the great knowledge of the Navy I was assigned to be sound officer on the submarine. I couldn't hear the signals coming from the enemy submarines, so I went to Kresge's department store and bought some parts and devised an amplifier where the sound signals came out as a movement on a dial. By looking at the dial, I knew if we were on target for an enemy ship and could fire a torpedo. It worked very well, and our submarine was the only one that was scoring hits. Soon, so many people had these amplifiers and were scoring hits that the Navy Department heard about it, and they asked me to develop a model of this amplifier using the finest parts. I put it together and it didn't work. In desperation, I went out to Kresge's and bought these cheap tubes and transformers and put together the Eddy Amplifier and it worked. It became a very interesting patent because it only worked with Kresge parts. That's how I got into electronics."
"In 1934 the Navy finally tripped me up by changing to an electronic system of measuring hearing. I was sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for retirement."
Fortunately, the Navy's loss was Philo Farnsworth's gain...
That's not to say it's good for there to be people so uneducated, but it might not be as bad as a naïve reading of official figures might make one think.
Instead, it's the illiterate children of nonimmigrants that make me really worry, but I don't know how many of them are.
But about that 21-23% figure.. Here in wikipedia is a map that shows <5% illiteracy in USA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Literacy_rate_world.svg
'Functional illiteracy' encompasses people who can read and write, but not with the fluency required to function in society, for instance, when understanding and completing a job application.
Let's face it though; do you really think you live in a society where >95% of the population can read and write fluently? Educated people tend to live in a bit of a bubble, surrounded by others like them, but YouTube tells a different story.
I just don't think things were any better in the past in composition or comprehension.
I left school my senior year, and went into a career in computers. I had been a part of the "computer underground" since 12 or 13, and knew UNIX better than most admins. I couldn't speak or write properly however. Turns out employers, weren't too keen on odd combination of l33+ sp34/<, and street slag. I relied on two co-workers over my first several years of work to teach me English. I think I've been free of "tooken" for nearly a decade. Thank God.
It wasn't the school's fault, I made a choice. I could of easily gone to a decent college, but laziness and lack of priorities could have derailed my life. I was lucky enough to have these guys take an interest in me.
(1) I took english 101-102 at a community college, similar to what author describes. But the professor neither explained how to write literary papers, nor read student papers before giving out grades.
The vast majority of society functions at a cognitive level that is so low as to be shocking. What's even more amazing is that these people are able to hold a job, earn a living, and have a family.
People who have higher thinking skills live in an entirely different world from the mainstream of humanity. It turns out that intelligence is a lot less necessary to leading a normal life than you and I might think.
How many things in your life can you fix by yourself? The typical car mechanic is far less dependent on others to keep things running.
> Isn't academic aptitude strongly correlated with ability to succeed in the world at large
No.
In fact, even in the areas where you'd expect academia to be most relevant, half of the genius' are academic failures. (The academics do dominate the middle, but that's probably because academia is used as a filter and that keeps out all but the best of the academic failures.)
> the educational system is a massive failure
Not massive, but anything else that "succeeded" as well would be considered a failure. However, the bigger failure may be outside the educational system, expecting things from it that it can't deliver.
Then again, that may be academia's fault. Who else would think that the ability to comment intelligently on the wizard of oz has broad predictive power.
FWIW, the guy who wrote Babylon 5, which is full of literary representation and symbolism, ie abstraction, says that he can't handle "let X = 5".
Here is my attempt.
Shortly after we're born, we begin to perceive a certain amount of value in everything we encounter. We assign value to food, attention, comfort, safety, pleasure, affection, entertainment, possessions, virtue, appearance, and a million other things. We assign value to a thousand instances of a hundred types of those things - particular tv shows, certain cars, particular kinds of attention, certain types of pleasure, even one virtue over another. Automatically, they line up along a spectrum of desire and the sorting continues each moment till we die.
Some people value books more than people. Books have never hit them. Some people value an infomercial on tv more than any book imaginable. They still remember all those years ago how the class laughed when they had to read aloud. They don't feel stupid watching tv. They don't feel poor, inferior, or much of anything while it's on. A superficial man can see a woman and in a tenth of a second assign a value to her. We call him superficial in hopes that he will start valuing her other qualities more. A child of six in a bad neighborhood somewhere has never seen any of their friends or family open a book for fun. With perfect logic the child's mind takes note of what seems valued and what does not, by people like him. A very reasonable, and very wrong valuing ensues.
And there is something out there that each person on this website ought to value but doesn't for the very same reasons: We haven't yet encountered it, or we didn't understand it when we did, or the people around us didn't seem to value it, etc. High school art class comes to mind.
You are on this website right now because at this very moment you value it more than everything else that can at this moment be had. Not because of your DNA or inherent intellect, but because at some point you began to value time on this website, and before that websites in general, and before that time on computers, and before that a million other things that compose rungs on a ladder to somewhere.
And by my simply saying that, many of you will suddenly call into question the value of being on this site right now. That questioning is the combination of your own ability to reason, imagine, and introspect as well as your environment of which my words are now a part. And those four ingredients more than anything else are what have formed your beliefs, including your beliefs about what is to be valued.
Scholastically, life works out better for people who value books more than television. And better still for people who value knowledge more than almost everything else.
Things work out better when we value things of value.
There's more to this picture than just stimulus response/valuation/categorization.
For an overview of the evidence, I recommend The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.
My point was that the conclusions we come to about the world around us are the largest factor in determining where we end up on the spectrum between mediocre and extraordinary.
If we really thought DNA was more important than our beliefs, we would spend less time trying to correct and inform each other on Hacker News and more time getting our genes sequenced.
Also known as "the blank slate theory." Or mostly-blank, if you want to be pedantic.
Twin studies have shown, as far as intelligence is concerned, that when two identical twins are raised in two different environment their intelligence is quite similar.
Now who plays the greater role? Well who came first the chicken or the egg?
Was it the environment who turned on a certain gene, or was it the gene who went to find a certain environment?
When children start education most are the same. Most watch television, most go to school. Does the child prefer watching television because of his genes or because of the environment?
I personaly can not doubt that both play a role, but also I can not doubt that in most circumstances the environement tends to play a greater role. Nonetheless neither can be discaunted and both are crucial.
"Truly rich people talk about ideas, poor people talk about other people."
The author seems to think one aspect of education is to propagandize a certain political view, and that the success of the same would validate forcing education on people. If it makes him feel better, then...yes, of course reading such things will have an effect. Where did you get your ideas from? Obviously, a brain not so capable of absorbing information tends to stick to its instincts. That's why not every human quality is curable.
I do wonder if the author realizes that many police officers come from a poor background, probably much unlike his own. Maybe they don't need Steinbeck to learn about the subject.
When I made the parent submission to HN ~2hr ago which contained this article, I was going to post to the original source shortly but good to see you do it. That is what it is all about, helping each other :)
(I deleted the submission as it linked to this article in reference rather than the original, and did not follow the “Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter” in http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Anyway, if you find the article interesting you may enjoy some of the other ones I was reading at the time (also with good links) that were useful...
Which Universities Have No Chance at Entrepreneurship?: http://campusentrepreneurship.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/which...
As Textbooks Go 'Custom,' Students Pay: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121565135185141235.ht...
The latest National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship newsletter shares a great new paper by Block and Keller called “Where do Innovations Come from?: http://www.publicforuminstitute.org/nde/news/2008/enews-08-0...
I agree with the author, not everyone is cut out for English classes, but I think an alternative to these "trying help you an write essay" classes should be some kind of "just read a book and enjoy it" class. It would be a start anyway. In school, any hope of loving English literature is usually destroyed by some kind of forced book dissection or compare and contrast garbage.
While mulling over a good book and discussing it can be enjoyable, the attempt to squeeze deep meaning out of something that the author put in by chance simply kills the joy of a good book.
Besides, I find that often the books that tend to be chosen for literature classes (at least in high school) tend towards empty, meaningless "classics" about empty, meaningless people. Reading this sort of book really ends up sucking the joy out of an English class.
I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest, and that, truth be told, if the author wanted to tell me something, he ought to have come out and said it directly instead of beating around the bush with "symbolism" that to me was as clear as mud, and that in the process he would have saved us all a great deal of time because his message wasn't really all that difficult to summarize in a paragraph or two.
I think I've already used this story once on HN, but what the heck.
The assignment was to address Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra. I pointed out several instances of Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra, then as a conclusion, said that I actually didn't think there was really any Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra at all, but "found" some to fulfill the assignment.
When I got my paper back, it had positive remarks in the margins, until the remark at the end saying "Jim, we need to talk about this."
I got an A in that class.
In the same way, symbolism is intended to trick the mind into grasping a concept it consciously has problems with understanding, or perhaps outright disagrees with. It's like grinding a vitamin into dogfood--the dog won't notice, but it's getting healthier. You might be an ardant anti-___ist and never want to hear a single word on ____ism, but a carefully crafted allegory about ____ism might have you more of a believer than you knew.
This is more apt to apply to classes in history than to computers, however. Even then, there are popular misconceptions to deal with.
Mark 4:10 When he was alone, those around him and the Twelve asked him about the parables.
Luke 8:10 He said, 'The secret of the kingdom of God is granted to you.'
Mark 4:11-12 'But to those on the outside, everything comes in parables so that they may look and look but never perceive, listen and listen but never understand.'
I know literary criticism is about as popular as Windows ME here, but reading good examples of it can be as enjoyable as the text itself(1). Of course there's always the question of how much authority the critic has -- but it's kind of like having someone with a lot of expertise explain the Linux kernal to you, even if it's not Linus.
To your last point -- I feel bad for you if those are the kind of books you had to read in high school. What were they?
(1) If you want to know what I'm talking about, try the Viking Critical Edition of Don Delillo's 'White Noise'. It has examples of criticism both of the kind I'm talking about and the kind that pg and others rightly mock.
What I hated was attempting to mash meaning into every word in the story, even when there was obviously none intended by the author. An example I remember was when, in The Great Gatsby, it was mentioned in passing that someone had blue eyes, and the teacher went on and on about how that represented sadness, how it showed the economic differences between the classes, etc, etc. No, it meant that the eyes were blue. stop putting words in the author's mouth.
As for the kind of books that I had to read -- I found the Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) to be utterly horrid. Bad writing, large plot holes, poor continuity, etc.
To be fair, many of them (eg, A Streetcar Named Desire) I disliked simply because I found the characters distasteful and unappealing. ("meaningless people with meaningless lives")
I can still hear my English teacher saying their names over and over again...
Of course, I didn't read it for school, which might make all the difference.
I had a lot of great science and math teachers and a few great history teachers. I had some good English teachers but none who were really great. I think that's because people with math and science degrees have plenty of job opportunities, so only the ones who really want to teach high school even consider it. Probably the best English teachers I had were baby-boomer or older women who would have done something else if not for workplace misogyny. As they retired they were generally replaced by ignorant young women.
I love reading and I can write lucidly, but I knew people in college who had had really strong English instruction and can analyze a novel on first reading in ways that wouldn't even occur to me after a month of full-time study.
Its probably all the more difficult for the teacher to grade the lower end of the scale. Giving a B grade is probably pretty easy. The paper was pretty good, but not an A. From there on down it gets difficult to wade through the errors and bad constructions to figure out if perhaps the ideas were of B quality but everything else was a C or D. I'll bet that the lower end of the scale is the most difficult and gives the most grief.
Its like judging climbing routes. They have this whole rating system (5.8, 5.9, 5.10a, 5.10b, 5.10c, 5.10d...) that is wholly subjective, much like an english paper. However, if you were told that something was a 5.10a, and you could climb it, you could surely judge climbs around it. "oh, well that climb was pretty hard, I just barely made it after several tries at the crux (the hardest move). It must be a 5.10b or c."
On a side note, grading "quantitative" tests isn't easy or grief free either. Math tests with lots of mistakes are frustrating. You want to give as much credit as possible for correctness, but for a multi-step problem, how does one assign points for correct ideas but incorrect implementation. What if they screw up the first step, that didn't allow them to do any of the other steps, but they had the right idea for those? Its quite challenging.
We tend to never look at the underbelly of academia, particularly those who are well served post-college in a world of newly minted bonus checks and corporate perks. Discussion exists as to where the process went wrong, a process that favors the inevitable elite and rich, but I have yet to see one solid and compelling reason why education (on average) fails compared to our European counterparts.
Excellent article.
Arts degrees are a luxury for children of rich families, not a good way to get ahead in life.
Having said that, I found the author a bit whiny.
I can almost hear his supervisor at his "night job"
"Old Professor X seems like a nice enough sort," they'd say, whispering among themselves, "but he'll never be ready for a job a at a major university. Sure -- he might get published in some rag like The Atlantic, but serious work? Not likely. He's just not cut out for it."
It's all in your perspective. You could take a guy with the same students and the same success ratio and he could write a story about how rewarding it was to help people at night school!
I think that's why I liked it so much: it was so artfully done that I couldn't help but think that the same experiences could be written to drive home a completely opposite conclusion.
By the time people are college aged, they are pretty set in their ways. Educational miracles where whole classes are swept up into success generally happen with younger students.
The line that really lit me up was this:
Our dialogue had turned oblique, as though we now
inhabited a Pinter play.
-- Mark Twain
This article is so spot on, it's a little eerie. Do all adjuncts feel the same way?
When you try to talk to those kids, it's totally like a Pinter play.
I also completely empathize with the high-lows he described. Teaching is a high, especially if you allow yourself to be deluded into thinking your students are interested and learning; that makes the lows of having your delusions shattered at grading time that much lower.
It follows even on through to the wall street ibanks. "Ivyleague type with above 3.7 GPA."
look at the mess they are in now.
I can't see any reason why everybody must be good at something. There's nothing about genetics which says that random genes will combine in such a way as to give them at least one useful skill.
How would we go about testing your hypothesis?
The hypothesis I proposed is too broad to prove easily. Maybe, we can start with a narrower premise. We can disprove "if you suck in English class, you are no good for college". A friend of mine, a maths genius, got a D in History class in college (without deliberately trying to fail) He had straight A's in all technical courses (CS, maths etc).
Not only that, in math (and programming, etc), you just "get it" and thereafter practice it to get the straight A's. In History, even if you understand everything, you'll always have to memorize dates, names, people, places, etc.
This why smart students do well in school without having to study too hard, but maybe get worse (or even better) grades than the not-so-smart students who study their ass off and memorize everything.
Hah. That women may very well be average at a lot of things, and bad at the rest.
This idea that "everyone has a special gift!" is just pixie-dust dreaming. Most people simply aren't special, in any sense of the word.
Fight Club: "We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact."
The sooner people learn that, the sooner they can get on with their lives of mediocrity.
The fact is that people have differing levels of ability. but with everybody screaming for 'equality,' everyone has to have some 'special gift.' I'm not saying that some lives are worth more than others (although there's an interesting philosophical argument against this), but the idea that 'you can do anything you set your mind to' is false.
I, too, taught "literature" to people that could barely read. It sucked.
If you can't read, you should learn the mechanics of how to read before dealing with things like "foreshadowing" "theme" "denouement."
Just, basic stuff.Otherwise, it's just ridiculous.
That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money. Not raping them in their vulnerability, naivete, and ability to get a loan.
No, that's what high schools should be doing.
No wait, actually, that's what primary schools should be doing.
"I wonder when the state legislature is going to notice that they are giving us money to teach to students the same things they gave high schools money to teach to the same students?"
Oh, and also... if you're going to be claiming to be an English lecturer and complaining about illiteracy, you should probably master the rules of apostrophe placement first.
2) I quit to write software.
3) I would have been overjoyed had my students made the kind of grammar mistake (student's) I made in my off the cuff remark. In fact, my experience doing this has made me incredibly forgiving for this kind of thing, I guess in my own writing as well as that of others. Basically, if the meaning is clear and obvious I don't really consider it a mistake, just being a pedantic snob. The problem you get with people who really don't know how to write is the meaning isn't clear, I mean really not clear. You get, like, word salad, metaphors so brutally mixed that who knows what point was trying to be made, a level of incoherence that truly impedes what is trying to be communicated -- it can range from severe annoyance to total incomprehension. Grammar is for pedeants, get your point across and I'm your friend. Unfortunately many people can't.
Previously, in HS, I was terribly bored with most subject matter presentation and irritated by authority in general.
I had been an avid reader since 5 or 6 and had read science fiction/fantasy and classic literature during these formative years. I did not do well in the college environment. I dropped all my classes.
Years later, I returned to college: emphasis had once again turned to the printed word, symbolism, and other recognizable concepts rather than any ability to use a computer. 4.0 average for two semesters was the result.
At the third semester I found myself in honors courses which irritated me with opinions I was too immature to discard gracefully and once again dropped out.
Provided as counterpoint to this article.
Page 2 top:
"I can’t believe it," she said when she received her F. "I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper."
Page 2 middle:
"I can’t believe it," she said when she received her F. "I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper."
Maybe same can be said for those people who value knowledge for its own sake as most people (the majority) do not, hence the minority who does has an inherent maybe gentical advantage.