pulling out the hair of kids who can't write well

[Matt Hicks <matt -at- UNIDATA -dot- UCAR -dot- EDU>]

Wanted to comment on both threads. :-)

As someone else mentioned, teachers can't teach if kids don't try to learn
and parents don't support both in the process. This was, in fact, the theme
of my valedictory address upon graduating from high school ('83).  I felt
this was a message that needed to be heard (and it was as close as I could
get to the "go to hell" speech that I wanted to give; no warm fuzzies
generated from my teen years). I attended a small (make that "tiny") school
in rural Maine, a place where I'm nearly convinced evolution was working
backwards, but I digress. Anyway, one frustrating thing that I noticed
was that most of my classmates' parents showed no interest in what their
children did in school until the students brought home their report
cards; if the grades were bad, some of them "got a beating". I'm not sure
if this system would have worked if the beatings were delivered based on
performance on daily assignments, but it surely wasn't effective on a
quarterly basis. So my valedictory address, while not completely exonerating
teachers, laid the blame for poor scholastic performance in large part at
the feet of apathetic parents (I don't recall a standing ovation :-).

There is also an attitude on the part of many students that teaching is
active and learning is passive. In my years at the University of
Colorado, I was continually hearing students trash professors when their
grades didn't measure up (which, due to rampant grade-flation, occurred
less regularly than would have been appropriate). "She/he's a bad
teacher," I would hear from the guy/gal that I know didn't open a book
until the night before the test and who went skiing every Friday. Many of
them seemed to think that the information was supposed to be injected
into their brains as though from a syringe, while they could sit in class
and prattle on about the raging kegger at Sig Ep. Well, enough of that...

<soap box mode off; Wonder Twin powers deactivate>

As to the "why do people ask to be edited and then get upset when they are"
thread, I was looking over an announcement the other day at a meeting of our
Employee Activities Committee. I pointed out the need for a hyphen in one of
the phrases, and one of the other members of the committee basically said, "I
don't think you should try to use hyphens since nobody understands them
anyway." This was a shocker to me. I argued that _I_ for one understood the
use of hyphens and found missing ones much more distracting than the presence
of one that probably didn't really need to be there. She remained
unconvinced. Overcoming such attitudes is one of the major challenges of
being an editor.

Whew! Guess I better get to work while I still have challenges to worry
about.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Matt Hicks, Tech. Writer, Unidata * I may not agree with what you
Boulder, CO, (303)497-8676, ******* say, but I'll defend to the
matt -at- unidata -dot- ucar -dot- edu ************* death my right to mock you.