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91
DnD Central / Re: Grammatical Mutterings
Last post by OakdaleFTL -
Hooray for New Math!

https://youtu.be/zWPn3esuDgU

And new, new math...

Imagine an arithematic text that attempts to substitute for rote and rules many of the tricks and shortcuts clever kids (and even most dull adults!) use.. Less than a decade ago I was faced with just such an abomination. It was prepared for 3rd and 4th graders — and I know at least one whose current distaste of mathematics likely stems from his experience with that program.
In more ways than one, teachers' college is a misbegotten idea: Fads fester in their well-fertalized soil!
92
DnD Central / Re: Grammatical Mutterings
Last post by Frenzie -
Quote from: ersi on
But the teacher should not rely on students' self-learning. It's part of the teacher's job to verify that the concepts have reached the student by giving tests that are different than the introductory examples were.
I still remember how I was one of the few who managed to add something like 97+6, whereas there were many who made up random answers or just gave up. They either didn't think a number over 100, which we'd never explicitly learned about, was allowed, or they somehow couldn't conceive of it despite knowing about 1–9 and about 10–99. I'm not sure why I particularly recall that example, but it's illustrative for pretty much every subject.

But granted, regardless if you'd already figured it out for yourself, such matters as books, novels, short stories, fiction and non-fiction, are a standard part of learning how to read and use the library, and it's not like school didn't dot some Is and cross some Ts for me. Going more in-depth about the differences between tabloids and quality newspapers did indeed elucidate, even though the differences as such were obvious. Conversely we also learned all kinds of bizarre robotic methods for "understanding" and "analyzing" non-fiction texts.
94
DnD Central / Re: Grammatical Mutterings
Last post by ersi -
Quote from: Frenzie on
The concepts are something you'll generally have figured out by yourself years prior. If you're lucky there'll be some deeper analysis, but the steps in school are slow and late. It's not like they tell you about picaresque novels or something when you're six years old.
But the teacher should not rely on students' self-learning. It's part of the teacher's job to verify that the concepts have reached the student by giving tests that are different than the introductory examples were. In my youth I learned by osmosis like you and was an eager self-learner, but teachers must help slow learners catch up too, particularly in the first years.

I remember now that the difference between novel and short story was taught to me on primary level, so that the difference of these from the concept of a book was a given. If Americans and Brits do not have it in their schools, they better start before it's too late.

Edit: Oh, and it also helps that in schools we rarely say "book" but rather there is a different fancy general word that means something like oeuvre in French, so that's what we say when we want to seem educated.
96
DnD Central / Re: What's Your Favorite U.S. Supreme Court decision?
Last post by OakdaleFTL -
Regarding the current transgender attitudes, I'd agree with Paglia, who [said] that she is "highly skeptical about the current transgender wave" which she thinks has been produced by "far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows". She [has written] that "In a democracy, everyone, no matter how nonconformist or eccentric, should be free from harassment and abuse. But at the same time, no one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of their eccentricity."

Far better had Gorsuch insisted that it was the job of Congress to do the right thing, for the right reasons, rather than force a new interpretation on an old law. By trying to be "fair and tolerant" (as is his wont) he's offered encouragement to forces inimical to our civil society.
Please note: The majority of actors in The Movement seem utterly opposed to civility!
98
DnD Central / Re: Grammatical Mutterings
Last post by Frenzie -
Quote from: ersi on
But I mean the concepts. Why else teach vocabulary than to elucidate concepts?
To a very large extent you learn vocabulary to be able to talk about things with other people. The concepts are something you'll generally have figured out by yourself years prior. If you're lucky there'll be some deeper analysis, but the steps in school are slow and late. It's not like they tell you about picaresque novels or something when you're six years old.
99
DnD Central / Re: Grammatical Mutterings
Last post by ersi -
Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
Chinese never really caught on...
Chinese is doing fine. You'd know this if you visited Asia. Every pilipina I chatted with for a longer while claimed some Chinese heritage, thinking this raises them above average folks, and wanted to migrate to Singapore, where Chinese is official language.

Quote from: Frenzie on
I should hardly think the distinction between book and novel[1] is something one has to be purposefully taught.
It never occurred to me either, but apparently it has not been taught and the consequences are serious.

Quote from: Frenzie on
Note that I explicitly mean the vocabulary, not the concept.
But I mean the concepts. Why else teach vocabulary than to elucidate concepts?
1 Or rather, boek and roman, as @jax pointed out.↵
100
DnD Central / Re: Grammatical Mutterings
Last post by OakdaleFTL -
What possible political purpose would the distinction serve? :)

Similar to the way the acronym DEI was named: An unwanted (i.e., not useful) connotation had to be precluded: The logical order of the terms should make it Diversity, Inclusion, Equity... But -unlike the days of MAD- we live in a politicized world, where even a sense of humor is only permitted within the bounds proscribed by the current ideologies.