Article

2005-07-05 Home Front: Politix

Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.

Posted by snoopdogg4doo 2005-07-05 00:50|| || Front Page|| [1 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Regards the title's assertion, I'd say, "at least".

I've worked with several people who were very bright and inventive, but had such poor writing skills they dared not put forward their ideas for fear of revealing this weakness. I even found myself asked by the managers of people who had survived this discovery to "proofread" (read: edit or rewrite) their written work. This usually required me to "interview" them as I painstakingly tried to make sense of the hash they had produced. Two people to do a simple one-man job. Oh yeah, that's productive. One curiously consistent fact was that each and every one of these people was younger, usually a full generation so. They were valued employees for their technical expertise, but inept and terrified of written work. Sometimes management covered this up by calling it "mentoring"... I was a mentor many times over and I'll wager several (at least) here at RB know precisely what I mean.

Per the Opinion piece on Page 4, today, I'd say that standard English courses in the US education system are, apparently at all levels, nearly worthless - and have been for a long, long time. Diagram a sentence? Lol - these people had difficulty even developing a simple overview (Can you say "Executive Summary"? Lol.) or logical outline - the simple 90,000 ft view. Sad.

Posted by .com 2005-07-05 06:09|| 2005-07-05 06:09|| Front Page Top

#2 .com-
Along the same lines, I had some similar experiences while working for Becton/Dickinson down here in SC. (They make those weird little blood sample tubes with the goop in the bottom). About 2/3rds of the workforce is black and had come up through the Bad Old Days of a segregated school system. The result was that many of them my age or older simply cannot read or write much beyond a 1st or 2nd grade level, but they can do their jobs in their sleep. I often found myself helping more than a few of my fellow employees, especially when they put in a computerized materiel tracking system here ( I could tell you some funny/sad stories about people who literally had no idea what a PC or a keyboard or a mouse was when I tried to train them on the program)
The company - always eager to cut jobs - knew this, and implemented a series of tests intended to 'streamline' productivity. The folks I mentioned, of course, couldn't pass the tests to save their lives, and are now being slowly eased out of their jobs - before retirement, of course.
The point of all this is that from my perspective, anyways, the companies have zero interest in bringing these people up to speed, and are eagerly looking for ways to 86 them. The cost to the taxpayer is only going to go up, and to a great extent thanks to the employer.

Mike

Posted by Mike Kozlowski 2005-07-05 07:49|| 2005-07-05 07:49|| Front Page Top

#3 "The commission is calling for more Congressional funding for the National Writing Project, a professional development program for teachers, and what Kerrey says are proven methods for improving writing instruction in classrooms."

Or -- let's address this by providing funding to the education industry for yet another bureaucratic empire building exercise.

"But the biggest boost to writing instruction may come from the decision by the College Board, under Caperton, to add a written essay to the SAT college entrance exam. The essay, which debuted in March, is expected to cause many high school English teachers to put more emphasis on composition. Critics, however, say the essay is formulaic, coachable, and a poor way to test the kind of writing skills students need in college."

Or - another attack by 'critics' againt any measure to evaluate the true state of education in our country. Wasn't it 'critics' of the SATs who insisted that a writing sample be included -- to add a subjective element since the objective elements of the SAT were showing a continual decline in student knowledge and ability?

And, lastly, I too was asked by a boss to 'mentor' a co-worker by assiting her in her written output. What he really wanted was for me to proof and edit her incomprehensible writing. Our relationship suffered when I pointed out that he was her supervisor and I wasn't and that her performance was his responsibilty, not mine.

Posted by Highlander 2005-07-05 09:39|| 2005-07-05 09:39|| Front Page Top

#4 Mike - Need a good laugh? Well the first time I went to Saoodi my first assigned taskI was to correct a massively stupid mistake: add disk drives to a shitload of diskless PC's. In those days networks simply could not handle the load of all server-based applications. For the first 25 or 30, every time I popped the cover on a box to add the disk and lay down the OS, it would draw a crowd of Saoodis. Like the Noob I was, I presumed they were checking out the gear, the interface cards, etc. Nope. They had never seen the innards of a PC before. Turns out they had never seen the innards of any electronic devices, before. They had precisely zero idea how it worked, and most agreed the fan must be the most important part - because it was the only thing they could see actually doing anything. I was new, so not aware of their total ignorance, but it turned out they knew nothing of electricity to speak of, much less solid-state circuitry. They were all, every one of them, graduates of some university. Most from KFUPM, King Fahd Univ of Petroleum and Mining, but some from US & UK schools. Think they were held to the usual rigorous standards? Lol. This was the creme de la creme of Saoodi technical expertise. It was, um, novel - and enlightening, lol! Being a die-hard romantic when I went over the first time, I didn't become cynical or utterly disillusioned for, oh, at least a month, lol.

Posted by .com 2005-07-05 10:16|| 2005-07-05 10:16|| Front Page Top

#5 Mucki caught a live one last night on page 4.

Posted by Shipman 2005-07-05 13:00|| 2005-07-05 13:00|| Front Page Top

23:46 RWV
23:45 Phil Fraering
23:40 trailing wife
23:38 trailing wife
23:36 OldSpook
23:31 Cyber Sarge
23:18 R
23:13 trailing wife
23:10 JosephMendiola
23:01 JosephMendiola
22:57 trailing wife
22:55 LC FOTSGreg
22:51 badanov
22:49 JosephMendiola
22:40 Darth VAda
22:38 Frank G
22:36 .com
22:33 Atomic Conspiracy
22:28 mmurray821
22:18 LC FOTSGreg
22:14 Old Patriot
22:13 Alaska Paul
22:08 LC FOTSGreg
22:06 .com