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 Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 4:44 pm
WARNING!
This topic contains examples of extreme idiocy and ignorance. Reader discretion advised. So, I'm an assistant to a Sophmore English teacher. I never had her as my own teacher, but she has been the moderator of the Literary Club, and she's a great person, very well-read and opinionated. However, when teaching English (and I hate to call it this but it's true) she gets all the "unintelligent" classes. I was reading some essays for her. This was the prompt: Quote: The world is an imperfect place, and one could throw the stone of criticism in many different directions. One direction in which I would throw a stone is_______. Complete the above statement by choosing a school, local, national, or world condition that, in your opinion, deserves to be criticized. In an essay, please explain why you chose it. Not hard, but I was surprised by the vast amount of essays that couldn't even answer the question. In fact, many either ranted about something they didn't like or wrote an essay on how we can end poverty. (My Mom suggested they didn't know what criticize means.) Some kids thought it was clever to repeat the same thing over and over and over again. They're weren't even clever enough to reword it. No, they had to say the exact same thing. But then there was the subject matter. Three essays written by girls criticized the school for making them wear "ugly and uncomfortable" shoes. It's their fault we get blisters (I've never gotten a blister from my shoes, thank you very much) and combat boots really aren't our style (they don't look remotely like combat boots.) Another essay blamed janitors for causing problems for students. After all, if they cleaned what they were supposed to, kids would be able to concentrate better. (This really angers me because the janitorial staff at our school is made up of some of the sweetest and hard-working people.) Another blamed the school faculty for the drug problems going on. Yes, I can see my Catholic, sweet-tempered, people-loving teachers at fault because rich kids were bored. Then came the utter ignorance. One kid wrote about how Roe Vs. Wade affected how we teach evolution in the classroom. But this is what really got me. Part sadness, part horror, part amusement at their utter stupidity, and I will quote, word for word, mark for mark. Quote: Martin Luther King Jr. was an amazing hero he abolished slavery + took everybodys advice + worked with his people. Forgive for taking the Lords' name in vain, but OH MY GOD! That did it. Abolished slavery did he? Well, at least I have my work cut out for me. Discuss: Ignorance you've witnessed Stupidity you've witnessed Bad writing you've witnessed All of the above you've witnessed
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Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 11:43 pm
Oh.. my.. >__<
I cannot believe all that. x__X Well, I somewhat can, but I can't believe that you had the will power to avoid following that last individual home and strangling them mercilessly with a stick. Yes, that is possible. Shh.
XD
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Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 1:23 pm
I went and turned them in today, and when I pointed the Martin Luther King Jr. thing out to the teacher, she sighed and said, "yeah, there were a couple who did that."
Luckily for the kid, I don't know them. It was a girl though. And she didn't like to use periods very much.
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Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 11:50 pm
....Ouch. sweatdrop That's pretty painful. I don't think I can think of anything off the top of my head to use as an example, but I TA for a college English 101b class (which is required for all majors, I think?) and I never cease to be saddened by the level of writing and intelligence the papers reflect. This from people who have supposedly graduated from high school or passed the equivalent tests. Some people write like they've never seen a comma or an apostrophe before, or use slang and chatspeak (in COLLEGE papers! That's some serious nerve rolleyes ), and there's always a couple of people who just make up new words or use nouns as verbs. sad The latter are the ones that make me want to smack something. You don't just... make up words or change the definition of one just because you can't be bothered to pick up a thesaurus or a dictionary. Technology makes it even easier: "m-w.com"!
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Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2008 8:31 pm
I recently wrote an essay on abortion and men, and I was argued against with the most rediculous and most inegalitarian thing I've ever heard in my life. "Sex is for procreation."
Now, this may have nothing to do with literacy, and this may have nothing to do with sheer stupidity as it is an opinion...But...I mean for the love of gawd and all that is good in this world..."Sex is for procreation"...
That is one of my stupid stories.
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Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 5:44 am
I think my favorite has been when a classmate asked me to read over a paper of hers for our Intro to Shakespeare class. The topic she chose to write on was how Hamlet was in crisis because he had recently learned that Polonius was his real father. With very little textual support and a lot of creative interpretation, it came off like a poorly written fanfiction. And she couldn't understand why I couldn't stop laughing.
The reason she chose that "unique" topic? Her boyfriend, who apparently played Hamlet in his High School theater group, was utterly convinced that it was true and demanded that she write it.
And after the teacher handed back her essay (which was practically dripping in red correction ink) with a failing grade, she was wholly certain that the teacher hated her and was out to make her "fail from college entirely."
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Posted: Tue May 13, 2008 4:10 pm
We did an excercise in my Junior English class where we traded papers with the person next to us, and graded eachother on a 1-9 scale (9 being best). The girl across from me gave me a 2, and said that I "had no thesis." Her paper actually started out with the sentence "My thesis is....."
The teacher later gave me a 9 on the same paper. >_>
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Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2008 10:40 am
i myself can not believe the amount of idiocy in the youth of today. i may only be a freshman but i have found the star example. are teacher asked us to write a paper on anything we wanted, simple right. he even gave us an example of the paper, the subject of that paper was the titanic. most of the class did not do it, even though it was half of the final grade, and the ones who did ether did the TITANIC or why death is bad. and the next day he asked us, as a test to wright a hiku, this is one of the hikus
the puppy is sick
he is not feeling well now
the puppy is sick
i sware that it took every fiber in my body not to shoot him amd his family for creating him evil
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Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 3:56 am
flaming ember 123 the next day he asked us, as a test to wright a hiku, this is one of the hikus the puppy is sick he is not feeling well now the puppy is sick i sware that it took every fiber in my body not to shoot him amd his family for creating him evil I think that the poor idiot should at least get some credit for knowing the structure of a haiku. Because while very poorly written, it does have the correct number of syllables per line and is, technically, a haiku.
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 6:25 pm
I feel like my IQ drops considerably just by being in towns for 5 minutes xd
I joined gaia because of the virtual world deal, and sometimes I give myself the pathetic mission of finding a compitent person. I've succeeded a few times.
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 6:49 pm
Lalaithion I think my favorite has been when a classmate asked me to read over a paper of hers for our Intro to Shakespeare class. The topic she chose to write on was how Hamlet was in crisis because he had recently learned that Polonius was his real father. With very little textual support and a lot of creative interpretation, it came off like a poorly written fanfiction. And she couldn't understand why I couldn't stop laughing. The reason she chose that "unique" topic? Her boyfriend, who apparently played Hamlet in his High School theater group, was utterly convinced that it was true and demanded that she write it. And after the teacher handed back her essay (which was practically dripping in red correction ink) with a failing grade, she was wholly certain that the teacher hated her and was out to make her "fail from college entirely." Haha, that happened to a few students in my English 1B class. The teacher would tell us to think of some off the wall creative topic, which, some students did. But the teacher later complained about how students were going on about topics that had no textual support what so ever. A girl sitting next to me was like, "Damn, he's talking about me." Anyway, my example deals with Hamlet too. I wrote my essay on Hamlet and decided to take advantage of the English tutors my teacher said were available on campus. The tutor I got ahold of was a middle aged woman, she scanned over my paper for about 10 minutes. All said said was, "It needs more commas." I was like, what about the content? Does it make sense? Trying to get more info from her. All she said was to tie in the history of Shakespeare with it. I didn't go back to the tutors again. This is community college level. Actually, I'm applying to be an English tutor this year. xd
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Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2008 11:41 am
GreenEyedDryad Ignorance you've witnessed Stupidity you've witnessed Bad writing you've witnessed To witness all of the above, just pick a YouTube video at random and read the comments. smile One more thing that should be on your list: laziness. To think King abolished slavery is ignorant, but to write an essay on King without doing any research -- not even five minutes reading his Wikipedia article -- is incredibly lazy.
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Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2008 4:01 pm
Cat Im a Kitty Kat Anyway, my example deals with Hamlet too. I wrote my essay on Hamlet and decided to take advantage of the English tutors my teacher said were available on campus. The tutor I got ahold of was a middle aged woman, she scanned over my paper for about 10 minutes. All said said was, "It needs more commas." I was like, what about the content? Does it make sense? Trying to get more info from her. All she said was to tie in the history of Shakespeare with it. I didn't go back to the tutors again. This is community college level. Actually, I'm applying to be an English tutor this year. xd That's pretty much the same reason I never use our tutors either. They don't read for content and, for the most part, only skim for large grammar errors. And as for the English tutoring...Good luck. I'll light a candle for you.
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Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 6:40 pm
I know that I am a sophmore, but last year in my HONORS english class I got bored and decided to help my teacher grade some papers, because she always asked me to. [I'm the top in the class.]
Anyways as I was grading some of the essays (we had to an essay on a topic of importance to us) most of my classmates had not wrote of this but of how the world was screwed. Which was not what was asked for. Now, not only did they do so, they decided to ramble on in some parallel dimension or something, because it did NOT in any way relate to their topic. It was completely Idiodic and irritating. I had to tell my teacher that I wasn't fit to grade the paper because I'd end up smacking somebody, or a couple somebodies.
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Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 6:46 pm
Sounds like my sophomore English teacher. I would prove him wrong with the dictionary and my Latin text book about a word cell and he would freak out and say I was lying.
I also knew words he didn't know, he yelled about what he thought the definitions were, but when I forced him to look them up they agreed with me. He would still yell that the dictionary was wrong.
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