Attorney generals trying to shut down usenet?

Multiple choice questions often are a problem. You have to be terminally stupid to score less than 20% in a five way multiple choice test.

That is a bit too strong. If the test is so weak that it is amenable to simple rote training then it is a clear measurement fault.

There is an old maxim. What you measure gets controlled and the corollary is that everything else goes to the wall.

And if their careers and bonuses depend on getting the best out of their class - what then? Hedge fund managers see nothing wrong with shorting a weak bank to deliberately drive its share price down for a quick profit or speculating on oil futures to drive them ever higher...

Big bonus and career progression or integrity you choose.

I thought this was mainly a problem in the UK where it is fashionable to say "I am useless at maths". Japan doesn't have this problem.

In English yes...

But in languages like Chinese and Japanese you have no choice ultimately but to learn to recognise whole words (and completely different phonetic readings of the same character according to context) it has to be that way. You also have to learn to draw them with the right stroke order.

My favourite Japanese nonsense rhyme uses various characters for "ni" and "wa". And translates roughly as "there are 2 chickens in the yard".

You can grow out of that by learning to flash read newspapers. It just takes practice - although I expect it is easier when you are young.

Assuming they taught it sensibly he would get the 2, 3 and 4 character phonemes first and grow from there. A few irregular UK English spellings of longer words might cause him trouble but it should still work OK.

He could still be genuinely dyslexic. One of the most brilliant guys I have ever met (a top mathematician) was seriously dyslexic at written English with a reading vocabulary of under a thousand words, but he was still amazing at solving mathematical research problems.

Several faddish methods to teach English have been and gone. But the guy you have described may well have some kind of perceptual problem.

Regards, Martin Brown

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:50:44 +0000, James Arthur wrote: ...

Unionized.

Thanks, Rich

They learned from Nawlins?

Thanks, Rich

I had a roaring headache a couple months ago, while getting groceries. From the next isle I could hear two women chattering, and a kid screaming at the top of her lungs. I looked up towards the ceiling and yelled, "Shut the hell up, right now!" All three shut up. I got a couple strange looks when they came around the corner. :)

A couple years ago i was in a Wal-mart a few weeks before Christmas. Some kid was cursing at his mother for not buying him some overpriced toy, telling her he was going to call DCF (Department of Childern & Families) and accuse her of child abuse if she didn't buy it. I couldn't help myself, I started laughing at the ignorant little punk. He demanded to know what was so funny, so I asked him what he expected DCF to do with him? He gave me a blank look, so I explained that they would take him away from his family, put him in a foster home with a bunch of other rotten kids where he would be lucky to get decent school clothes, and most meals, and that he could forget about ever having another toy. He looked up at his mother, in horror. She grinned and said, I might just call them myself, and walked away with him sulking in the shopping cart. :)

I can agree to that

They drove out the ones with that property.

I think it is a little deeper, the kids parents were afraid that their kids would find out how bad they are at math and demonized it before the kids could learn any better. Then all the kids who would learn math anyway went into accounting, math, science and engineering and the innumerate went into all other fields, including teaching.

In many languages there are such as diphthongs, accented characters, compound words, and different pronunciation by use. Good teaching always starts with the clearest and easiest examples. And progresses to higher levels of difficulty.

Speak for yourself, but if you study it you may find you are wrong. Personally, i recognize allophone chains Markov-stochastically, with rewind and retry.

I only seem to do that when i meet a word i do not recognize. And that has not been happening much for quite some time.

Yes, it was the asinine imposition of an oriental phd who could not be taught any better about the difference between ideographic written languages and phonetic written languages.

Actually that is normally done with visual skills and there are better methods to learn the techniques.

You got that right. Engineering, math and science are almost as bad.

It is not so much the ability to build them in the first place, but the impossibility of the political will to maintain them properly.

...and I told you why, though you didn't want to believe me. ;-)

At least serial killings would be a lot less popular. ;-)

You may find this data interesting:

That is a quite erroneous understating of natural laws. The society must train their members in the values. They must enforce the values to the point of complete exclusion from that society those would change or defy those values without understanding from whence they came. The societies values are voluntary by social contract or they are worthless.

Which reminds me, where are all the Katrina race-conspiracy theorists these days ?

Cheers, James Arthur

You reap as you sow... like New Orleans, Minneapolis, etc.

...Jim Thompson

When I was growing up, in WV, we had very near 100% because, back then, they realized one mold doesn't fit all, so my high school was...

1/3 business... secretaries, clerks, small store management, etc.

Now the dorks think everyone should go to college :-(

...Jim Thompson

I don't know, but the way I understand it, when white people went looting, they called it "foraging", but when the black people went foraging, they called it "looting". >:-[

Thanks, Rich

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

They don't even think that... they think everyone should have a "college degree," but they never intended for people to have to learn as much as the average college student did some 40+ years ago to get it. Hence you now have college getting dumbed down to the point where -- at least in engineering -- a master's degree might almost be equivalent to a bachelor's degree back then.

I still blame the business world to some extent, though -- big companies want people with four-year degrees just to work as receptionists, technical writers, salespeople, etc.? Please.

Whatever color, heisting a plasma TV isn't foraging. "Heist" sounds judgmental though, so I suppose p/c demands we call it something else.

How 'bout "undocumented shopping" ?

Cheers, James Arthur

Hey, it flooded like this in 1993, in Clinton's time. Think we'll hear a media outcry of what Bill should've done, how was all preventable, and his fault the levees failed?

Or lengthy, divisive diatribes and exposes bemoaning how it's a particular color or class of people who were deliberately targeted / erradicated / innundated / etc. ?

Naah, I don't 'spect so neither. 'Least I hope not.

Cheers, James Arthur

Not the right approach IMHO.

I believe the only effective method to learn a language well is full immersion. In full immersion there is no piecing together of letters, syllables, words and so on. It just pours down on you and you try to make sense of chunks of that barrage. Every day there'll be more chunks that begin to make sense.

Personally I learned two languages that way and it worked. Tried another (Spanish) where only the classical method of letters -> sounds -> vocabulary -> grammar was taught. Did not work for me at all. The result: I can understand some Spanish but cannot speak it, consequently unable to communicate in it.

Think of it this way: How did we learn to understand and speak as toddlers? Certainly not letter by letter. The only letters I had as a toddler came in the form of ginger bread and I ate them all ;-)

Or this way: How do we design circuits? Certainly not starting with "Here we have some 10K resistors and some 2N3904, let's make a circuit now". Good engineering starts at the top, with the specs the final design is expected to live up to.