I know I’ve been on a bit of an education bent recently and I apologize. I’m sure a lot of you couldn’t care less (well, except for Rebecca and Nimble, many thanks for your kind words). Besides, all that kids do in Kindergarten is eat playdough and play doctor anyway, so what’s the big deal?
Well, not to flog a dead horse or anything, but, I’m more than a little concerned with the education level of our employees who all grew up in California. Recently. Either that, or I need to seriously re-evaluate my hiring policies.
Like, OMG! Today I was asked how to take a third off a bill of $300. I have the hardest time getting people to calculate 120% of the Medicare rate, with a calculator. Don’t get me started on spelling (she writes while scrutinizing her spellcheck for hypocritical errors). Today I corrected the spelling of: should I wright this off, patient has payn in his leggs, and I applyed this to his deductable. These are not typos.
I sound like I’m a hundred years old.
If you grow up with spellcheck are you pre-disposed to not concentrate on spelling? I tend to ignore it (as you may have noticed) as spellcheck takes my Britishisms as a personal affront. If you spend your life using predictive text are you oblivious to correct spelling? Should anyone really care anymore – is it going to be redundant in a matter of years anyway? I have a feeling that we're transitioning to a world of doers, rather than editors, where the details are overlooked. That irritates me, but only because I'm so anal that I would have been a sensation before computers, personal organizers and the like. Now I'm resigned to being a reactionary manager seething at the fact I asked an employee to consolidate our files - stored by year - and she started in the middle....
A lot of people will say the problem is the lack of funding in education. Increasing class sizes and the like. To which my Mum and Dad had a good response. It's their class photo at the top of this post. I say 'their' class, because they are both in this picture, they were in the same classes together until age 11. I won't say which ones they are because if you know me, or them, I'll leave you to guess. They are classic boomers and they had 46 in their kindergarten class.
As my Mum said 'we had a huge primary school class and we turned out alright'.
Or should that be 'allwrite'?
5 comments:
Spotted your folks! Feeling very pleased with myself. You and Gregnifico are the only people that I bother to check my spelling and grammar for, and that's a compliment! (Now fretting about whether that sentence should read "for whom I check my spelling and grammar", but I'm going to post this anyway!) Spelling and grammar are important, I think, but I'm doing some Shakespeare at the moment, and he invented new words all the time, and twisted the syntax to make the verse scan, so maybe we just have to accept that language is an awesome (ossome?), constantly mutating thing? S x ps Spanna, how are you?
Now you know why I never leave any comments! I live in fear of your mental red pen.
Sincerely, Niferderfer
My spelling seems to get worse the more I twitter since no one seems to care if your tweets are grammatically correct. Although I do strive for grammatical correctness!
I only recently discovered your blog, but I've been enjoying it. Thank you!
As for education and size, I admit I'm in the "smaller is better" camp, and largely because I myself blossomed with more direct and personal attention, when I'd been flailing in a larger class setting. I think there's probably no simple solution, but I do think that No Child Left Behind has done a huge disservice to the US school system.
As for spell-check, etc., I'm a horrible speller, or used to be, so I focused on that and looked everything up in a dictionary (!). And I tend to ignore most of spell-check's highlights (it doesn't help that I'm colorblind, so Word's spelling vs grammar highlights are entirely lost on me).
Won't be able to make it over to Santa Barbara but thanks for the invite. If you go to ME you should pop over to NH & visit its gorgeous over here!
Post a Comment