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Students Failing Because of Poor Grammar
innocent_white_lamb writes "30% of freshman university students fail a 'simple English test' at Waterloo University (up from 25% a few years ago. Academic papers are riddled with 'cuz' (in place of 'because') and even include little emoticon faces. One professor says that students 'think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words.' At Simon Fraser University, 10% of students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses."
FTA:
"But "spelling is getting better because of Spellcheck," says Margaret Proctor, University of Toronto writing support co-ordinator.
. I'd like to see some hard evidence before I agree with this statement. In my experience, people tend to make spelling errors and go with the spell chedking results without actually investigating the error.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
as long as i can remember, the next generation has always looked worse than the previous generation. mostly because they did thing differently. generation X was said to be lazy 15 years ago because they sat around with their computers all the time instead of working in a factory
Some say, that Idiocracy was a documentary sent back from the future. And that The Man needs a dumbed-down populace to keep the likes of Walmart and the current political system in business. All we know is that popular culture emphasizes dumbness over intelligence. Welcome to 2010.
Sure, language in itself is arbitrary. But our orthography, syntax, and vocabulary are very good proxies for our education and intelligence, and decision-makers quite rightly use our communicate skills to judge these traits.
Even if using smilies in term papers merely indicated we were at the forefront of innovation in English, the inability of switch to a formal, scholarly register in the appropriate context would make us seem ignorant in the eyes of the world, and would hamstring our international credibility.
But no, that's not why we write like that: instead, it's because we're a nation of fucking imbeciles who hold education in contempt, and think of intelligence as a threat.
It's still "english" and the 'grammar' may be correct but you don't speak like that and it's not necessarily 'english' you'd recognize as how you think or speak in your own voice.
A rather silly complaint. If any book were written in the same way people spoke (pauses, repetitions, stuttering, incomprehension, disfluences, repetition, talking over one another, etc), it would be almost incomprehensible.
My wife works in the public schools. I learned one thing from her. Parents claim they want schools with touch academics. However, they also wants their kids to get a 4.0, or very close to it and go apeshit when it doesn't happen. So when a school does crack down and start to grade accurately to touch academic standards, the parents go ballistic. These parents start harassing the teacher, the principal, the administrators, and the school board.
So it's no shock that these kids, of which very little was ever demanded or expected of them, should suddenly find themselves failing college once the gloves come off.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Some say, that Idiocracy was a documentary sent back from the future
Other than having electrolytes, you know what the scariest thing about Idiocracy is? Every year that passes since it's release, that future seems not only more possible, but more probable.
My fiance thinks the future will be a combination of Wall-E and Idiocracy, but whatever...it's not looking good -_-;;
Living With a Nerd
I think the point is that currently the language is "de"-volving.
It's ok to create new compound words for new ideas and technologies. It's ok to have colloquial words included in the official language because everybody uses them. It's not OK to simply encourage laziness and sloppiness under the pretext of an evolving language. Maybe fast food restaurants prefer to use a sign that says "Drive Thru" instead of "Drive Through" because the sign is smaller (and therefore cheaper). That's no excuse to use the word "thru" in a thesis.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Cuz" is perfectly acceptable in an SMS. It is not in a paper. Someone who fails to distinguish between formal and informal writing may have difficulty distinguishing formal and informal behavior in other situations and end up telling your major client, who just happens to be a devout Christian, that she spent the last three days at a pot-fueled Wiccan orgy. (Or tell your other major client, who happens to be an LGBT activist, that she thinks all homos should be put to death by stoning.)
Mark Twain, anyone?
This XKCD comic was made just for you.
There's no global dumb-people-breeding conspiracy and every one of these kids has the ability for higher learning. The sad fact is there's a growing percentage that's never had to try in an education system where no-one fails.
Why learn proper english when the alternative nets you the same result and more free time?
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
I previously worked for about 8 years for a medium-sized marketing and design agency, as the lead web developer. On almost every project that passed across my desk, I seemed to be the only one spotting spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and punctuation problems before copy went to the web and to print. This was in a company of 30-ish young, university educated professionals in London.
When the programmers are copy-editing your marketing material, that should be a sign you've got literacy problems!
The weird thing was that when I sent the copy back, corrected, everyone told me I was being anal - apparently not bothered about bad copy to billboards and magazines nationwide.
I agree with a commenter above, though - I think coding does encourage attention to detail when a stray semicolon becomes important.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
I am an American, you neanderthal. How likely is it that I'm just spewing anti-American "propaganda" for propaganda's sake? It's rather telling that you'd rather hear good news than reality: when you see that happen, you know a company or organization or country is not long for this world.
I indict this nation because I love it, or more specifically, I love the ideas it was founded on, and what I've read it used to be like. What I resent is that I was born a generation too late to appreciate that cultural flowering, and that I'm around to see morons like you squander what should have made us the happiest, wealthiest, most enlightened people to have ever lived.
Fuck you.
So it's a bit of a cheap shot, but I can't help but quoting this sentence from your post, which later on complained about grammar:
As for the substantive point, I think the lack of good teachers is a bigger problem than a surplus of bad ones. It isn't like there's a long line of great teachers who are unable to find jobs, sitting impatiently behind this mass of horrible teachers that the union won't let us fire. Teaching is simply not a profession that attracts the best minds, for a mixture of reasons that mostly involve its relatively low status, relatively low pay, and poor working conditions (K-12 education is as much babysitting as teaching).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Language is about communication. You aren't supposed to use dialect terms or syntax in publications because a lot of the people reading it won't be native speakers. You and I know what 'cuz' means, but what about the reader whose first language is French, Spanish, Hindi, or Mandarin? It works for us because we can do the phonetic transform, but a native French speaker will wonder what 'coos' is meant to be short for or mean, and will have to look it up.
The tiny fraction of a second that you save typing cuz instead of because will cause people reading your paper to have to spend several seconds looking it up. The total time wasted, if more than a few people read your paper, will be several minutes. Wasting minutes of other people's time to save you a fraction of a second is incredibly impolite.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The particular issue is that we rely on grammatical and syntactic norms to make ourselves understood, particularly when attempting to convey complex structures of ideas. Trying to distinguish a gold-nibbed pen from a gold, nibbed pen, is a simple example. When you substitute your own grammatical norms, then you restrict your ability to convey ideas to those who share those norms. When you start to throw out grammatical constructs completely, then everybody - even those people that share your bespoke grammar - are reliant on context to understand exactly what you're trying to say. It might not even be possible for you to convey particular ideas, not to sound too Orwellian.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
People learning English as a foreign language get taught proper grammar and only learn the vernacular later.
People in England learn the street language and never get taught the grammar.
In online chat it's comical how often you can tell the 'Continental European speaking English' as opposed to the 'Native Brit or Irish person' purely from their superior grammar and spelling. That's particularly true for the younger age groups.
Problem is that all kids are prepared to pass those stupid tests and outside them they know jack shit
Hence the current Facebook protests that an exam asked questions that they hadn't been specifically taught the answers to. A comment quoted on national news was "that's 6 months of attending lessons wasted."
This worries me. People shouldn't be taught the test answers, they should be taught the basics in the subject and how to learn. The whole UK education system appears to be increasingly broken, and that (even more than the Government putting us into record debt) threatens the viability of the nation for the next few decades.
(Add it to the national debt and we're basically fucked.)
I have a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo and I live in the region still. One of the reasons that UW has so many people failing the ELPE (English Language Proficiency Exam), and one of the reasons it requires the test in the first place, is because of the numbers of foreign students at the university.
Waterloo has, I believe, the largest math and computer science programmes in the world. It also what is generally regarded as Canada's best engineering school. These hard science and engineering programmes attract a large number of far eastern students. When I was in school in the '90s, you'd have been more likely to hear Cantonese than English if you wandered around the Math building. I don't want to generalise, but many of these students probably come to Waterloo because they can get a great education in a programme that doesn't require them to speak perfect English, and where they have a large number of their peers.
Probably one of the reasons that Waterloo students fail the ELPE in such high numbers is that many of them are foreigners for whom English is a second, third, or fourth language. I only wish I spoke multiple languages as well as many Waterloo students speak English.
www.clarke.ca
Replacing 'because' with 'cuz' is theoretically a form of language evolution. Simplifying commonly used words is an acceptable evolution, particularly when there is no risk of misinterpretation. On the other hand, inserting commas in the same way you sprinkle Parmesan cheese is not language evolution. The lack of consistency impairs the ability to convey ideas; the student which produced the writing is likely incapable of producing the same patterns of commas twice. Misplaced commas, along with poor capitalization and spelling, can lead to all sorts of misinterpretations, e.g. the panda which "Eats, shoots and leaves," or the time I "helped my uncle jack off a horse." Language evolution is different from language deterioration.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Language evolves with how people use it... ... and speak it. The so-called "misuse" of grammar is kind of idiotic given that language is invented and grammar changes naturally over time.
We aren't discussing how people speak words to each-other. We're discussing how they write formal essays and tests. There is a specific syntax for these things, to ensure comprehension.
Sure, pseudocode is good for getting ideas across to other human beings and developing a rough idea of program flow... But it isn't going to compile. And it doesn't matter how much you argue that programming languages evolve over the years and get new features added and whatnot, your pseudocode still isn't going to compile.
Try reading a really old king james version of the bible. It's still "english" and the 'grammar' may be correct but you don't speak like that and it's not necessarily 'english' you'd recognize as how you think or speak in your own voice.
Actually, we have words for these things. Which is part of the complaint about the decline of the English language... Instead of using perfectly good words that describe exactly what you're trying to say, you borrow some other word that you already know, or stuff a bunch of random words together, and hope it conveys the right idea.
The main reason the old King James Version bibles read oddly is because they were written in Early Modern English - a period when folks were still trying to agree on the correct spelling of words. It doesn't help matters that they intentionally avoided modern (at the time) idioms in favor of already-archaic (but more impressive) ones... Or that they were trying to find English equivalents for Latin.
Let's also face facts there are many problems with the english language in general that don't make much sense at all from the way you pronounce a vowel or word and the way it is spelled. Not to mention the strange special cases of silent consonants and the like.
All of which is carefully documented, just like the proper use of parenthesis and semicolons and whatnot is documented in a programming language.
People like efficiency, while some may think this is an expression of illiteracy others just see it as the most efficient way to express an idea.
The problem is, this isn't a matter of opinion.
In day-to-day discussion, it might be enough to say that pi = "three-ish"... But on a math test, or an engineering project, they're going to expect quite a bit more precision.
And if you're writing an essay for a college class... Or taking some kind of placement exam... Then it isn't a matter of opinion. There is a right way and a wrong way to put your words together. And if you do it wrong, you will be graded accordingly.
The problem isn't that people put words together differently when they're speaking to another human being... Or when they're writing en email to a friend... Or posting a comment on a blog... Or throwing together a text message... The problem is that people do not know how to put words together when they are taking a test or writing an essay.
It isn't a matter of choice - such as when an author deliberately emulates the speaking style of a character. It's a matter of ignorance.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
And don't you think it's in your interest to live in an educated society? Education is intellectual infrastructure.
Are you the kind of person who would oppose a highway because some big-government bureaucrat would take your hard-earned tax dollars and plan the route without you?
Compared to the US, German universities are essentially free.
Of course you don't mean "free" as in beer. Most of your tuition is paid for by the good taxpayers of Germany who presumably view a well-educated citizenry as an overall win relative to the cost involved.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it."
- H. L. Mencken
I have five kids, ranging from two college graduates to a kindergartner, and I am not at all surprised. At the risk of sounding like someone who sits on his front porch and reminisces about the good old days and walking uphill to school both ways, while waiting for kids to touch my property so I can yell at them, I firmly and insistently blame primary schools. Over the years, somehow, phonics has increased in teaching, encouraging kids to try and spell more complex words (which is fine), but does not in any way penalize them for misspelling or bad grammar. My 2nd grader routinely turns in papers with words that would be a challenge for a 6th grader, yet I don't see any red ink or corrections, telling them how to spell the word correctly. I can only attribute this three ways: 1) the teacher doesn't have the time to do it (WTF?!?!?) or 2) they don't want to actually make someone feel bad for messing up (WTF?!?!?) or 3) they just don't care. Probably a combination of all three. This is especially prevalent with my 8th grader, whose grammar is only corrected for English class, but anything else she turns in for any other class is remarkably devoid of red ink to correct spelling and grammar.
With a lack of consistent reinforcement of the basics in every class and in every setting, is it any wonder that the kids can't spell when they get to college? I recall getting points marked down in all my classes (including science classes) for misspellings, and I am stunned by the fact that somehow proper spelling and grammar is not considered something that anyone other than an English teacher should be concerned about when grading.
Recently, we allowed our teenager to get a Facebook account, with the proviso that we remain her friends and that we have access to the account. I reply to every post she makes abusively correcting her piss-poor grammar.
Any way you cut it, a consistent use of proper red ink would likely solve this issue quickly, even for high-school aged children who have learned bad habits.
Bill
You know what is the most terrifying? I'm a foreigner in England and found that I know grammar and spelling better than most of my English friends. We're talking about people who passed through basic education system here, and at least half of them also through higher studies. If you ask them about grammar, apostrophe rules or spelling they will just say they never studied this. Nobody ever though them this. Then you wonder why all this is in total shambles.
Problem is that all kids are prepared to pass those stupid tests and outside them they know jack shit. There are exceptions, but general population is similar to Idiocracy one.
That's the funny thing. Many of the dumber grammatical errors you see on Slashdot are made by people who are evidently native English speakers. They're things that should have been corrected in grade school, like problems with "your" and "you're", or "their", "there" and "they're". As they occur in trends like many other mindless activities, the latest one is "loose" vs. "lose".
The tests and their failure to guarantee competence when passed is a natural result of the exaggerated and undue emphasis that schools place on memorization by rote. If you had a perfect photographic memory, you would breeze through most any modern school curriculum. That doesn't mean you'd actually understand what you have memorized or be able to adapt that knowledge to different situations.
We have created something of a Catch-22 or self-fulfilling prophecy: the standardized test dictates what the students are taught, so according to that test the students have learned. Nowhere in this do you find a regard for whether they have any real mastery of that knowledge. They're just being taught to regurgitate information with no real understanding and I could teach a parrot to do that. Writing in particular is generally a creative process. It has mechanical elements but does not really lend itself to mechanized repetition; it's not like operating a machine. It's no surprise to me that this is where the incompetence is most evident.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
"Some say, that Idiocracy" (parmesan comma)
These commas may be the result of the international adoption of English as the "lingua franca". In German (and possibly other languages), that comma would be correct. Many non-native English speaking and writing people learn from online conversations, which are often informal and written in an oral style. They learn from each other and so some of the rules in their native languages cross over into their English and into other people's English.
'its', the 3rd person singular possessive pronoun, does not require an apostrophe
That's an irregularity which can be real problem for non-native writers as well. The possessive form is normally created by appending apostrophe-s, so it's only natural to write "it's". The collision with the short form of "it is" is not apparent, especially when you use a formal writing style and avoid these short forms.
My sophomore year of high school I walked into my English class and started writing. My mind took over and, before I realized it, my I's were uncapitalized, my words were abbreviated, and many words were misspelled for the purpose of shortening. That summer I had spent more time on instant messenger programs than I had in past years. Without realizing it, my mind was setup to use Internet speak. The rules of grammar were still there, somewhere. They were hard to access, though. It was a struggle to get myself to start writing coherently. Since then, I've switched my style and have been trying to maintain proper grammar throughout all of my text conversations.
This was 2003
This is going to naturally happen in any situation in which people develop a shorthand language. I doubt teaching grammar in schools will help because most students will forget the rules before college. I question if there really is a solution to this outside of individuals taking notice and attempting to fix their mistakes.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
Good teachers were purged in the 80's then again in the early 90's when the last hold outs from the old guard (pre baby boomer) who believed that their profession was about teaching and not about cultural and social indoctrination were forced into retirement, sidelined or outright maligned.
It's all very boring. Good normal people won't go in en-masse because the teaching profession is chock full of psuedo-science and slightly unhinged useful idiots. They figure that out during Uni and get the hell out. No normal person wants to go into a classroom full of children 5 days a week completely disarmed and without any sort of authority and real disciplinary regime to back them up ("contracts" I LOLed as a teenager). Anybody who actually does attempt to teach outside of the mandated and bizarre "whole child" policy guidelines are very unpopular individuals and go no where in a hurry.
My most memorable teachers were the ones who would bark at the trouble makers (me included) and mean it. They no longer exist, even the most conservative private schools don't do punitive discipline anymore.
Allegedly a child can do no wrong.
Weep for the west.
"When I went to high school in the '70s I was never taught grammar in English. I learned grammar from Latin classes."
... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't spell, they can't punctuate,' " he says.
Budra was taught to read and write using whole language rather than phonetics - not a good way to go in his books.
I find this part interesting. In French canadian schools, we blamed the bad grammar back in the 80s for using phonetics instead of the more traditional methods. As I was told back then, they stopped using it in France because it didn't work while we here in Canada keeped using it for some 10 years and sacrificed an entire generation as far as grammar goes.
Needless to say, we're no better off today then we were back then as the failure rates of students just keeps rising in French Canada.
I feel that the problem is that we want to find a one size fits all approach and forget that no all kids absorb knowledge the same way or at the same speed.
A quick search in the local french news turns up a fact that did not get pointed out in that article. The new and current test in French universities points to a failure of over 50% for the teachers. How can you educate when you don't know what your teaching?
I suspect this failure would be pretty high in english schools as well.
It's rather interesting that no one's bothered to point any fingers towards teachers. I wish we could stop this blame the students mentality for all failures. Teachers have they're part in this too and they need to acknowledge it.
The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an email to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work.
"It would say to me
"These folks are going to short-change themselves, and right or wrong, they're looked down upon in traditional corporations," notes Postman.
The problem I see here is that as the language degrades, so will corporations' abilities to hire people with such skills and eventually it will end up in upper management.
If formal documents are written according to a certain set of rules while the average teenager write as he or she sees fit then it is clear that the average teenager is the one who is wrong. Many of the "txt speek" words and grammar constructs are either oversimplified to the point where a word has many possible meanings or, in the case of grammar, is mangled to the point where it is either extremely context-sensitive or simply unreadable. When you add numerous typos due to pure laziness ("wat gsu men u odn unsterna?!! lrn 2 raeed ckocglnbi faget!!1") the end result is not only unreadable but also completely without any kind of consistency, learning how one person communicates in "txt speek" rarely aides in the understanding of "txt speek" written by another individual.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Remember one simple fact: the skill set required for someone to get a Ph.D in any given field has very little correlation with the skillsets required for such tasks as dressing oneself, attending to personal hygeine, or speaking in coherent sentences. The only "skills" required to get a Ph.D are (a) access to enough money to exist as a student for the requisite time, (b) the ability to regurgitate what your professors wish to hear, and (c) the ability to attach oneself to a previous Ph.D recipient long enough to have one's hand held through the process of writing a thesis.
I know too many Ph.D's who cannot tell the difference between its/it's, there/they're/their, and other simple homonyms. These people also have absolutely no concept of the value of money and are more than willing to give a passing grade to papers and assignments that contain similar grammatical mistakes as mentioned by TFA and the parent post.
As regards Idiocracy, while hyperbolic, it definitely does call attention to a growing concern for Western society. The lowest-intelligence portions of our society increasingly sit as dependent breeding stock, suckling at the teat of government social programs generationally whilst producing an overabundance of mentally deficient young who then perpetuate the cycle. Diseases perpetuated only by reckless or ignorant behavior that should have no foothold in a modern society are instead coming back in force, due to these idiots insisting that "well there will be a cure in the next 10 years so I don't have to worry" (actual quote from one of these morons who passed on HIV to one of her kids in the womb).
Well-meaning idiots bemoan the "failure" of the education system while refusing to make the basic changes necessary to reform it. Enforcing classroom discipline and removing troubled and disruptive children have become impossible. Properly stratified classes that truly challenge and educate the best and brighest children, while placing the lesser intellects into properly focused remedial programs, are seen as "discriminatory" if a given district strays too far from the racial numbers that racial supremacist agitators want to see. In the name of "diversity", all children are instead randomly tossed into classrooms that move at the pace of the slowest idiot, causing the education of the truly intelligent to be stunted. In most cases, creativity and intelligence - two innate talents that should be encouraged at all costs - are instead actively stifled by jealous teachers who are themselves the dimmest bulbs of their own generation (remember, the average IQ of college students in Education-related degree programs is lower even than Communications or Physical Education programs). Entrenched, unqualified individuals (tenured teachers and teachers' unions) insist that an unregulated and unfocused "more money for Education", rather than properly spent money combined with the elimination of unqualified individuals and proven-ineffective teaching doctrines from the system, is the solution.
And of course programs proven to nurture intelligence and leadership are then attacked as well. Scouting has been under attack for decades, a true shame since it encourages young men and women to go out and be active in their community and grow into thoughtful citizens, as well as teaching life skills such as planning schedules, reacting to emergencies and maintaining a budget. Programs like the Young Democrats and Young Republicans have all but vanished, a true shame since these programs did much to teach young men and women to engage in civil disagreement (as well as community engagement and good citizenship!) rather than the partisan hackery that is all young children learn today from television shows. Music and fine arts programs have been vanishing all over the country, victims to both the "more money for test scores" problem and the growth, overadulation and overfunding of "sports" (specifically, football and basketball) which rely more on the physical grotesqueness of one or two "team stars" than an ability on the part of players to react to different situations as a team.
Scouting has been under attack for decades, a true shame since it encourages young men and women to go out and be active in their community and grow into thoughtful citizens, as well as teaching life skills such as planning schedules, reacting to emergencies and maintaining a budget.
That's quite a screed you've got there. I agree with some of it, and find a lot of it a little shrill. This bit I quoted kinda stuck in my craw though. I agree that programs *like* boy & girl scouts of america are a good idea. The problem for me is when the scouts shot themselves in the foot by trying to defend anti-gay policies.
I know that isn't an attitude I want drilled into my kids. No thanks. We have enough of that from our fathers. The molesters you have to look out for are almost never the out gays. It's just more gay-bashing clothed in the appearance of thinking of the children.
Maybe you should get involved with the scout leadership and get the thing on track again. It sounds like a paramilitary christian training camp to most people, I think.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
To their great joy, communication worked well between them even without this fancy 'grammar' grown-ups brag about.
Plenty of flamewars get started due to miscommunication when someone either says something that they don't mean to say, or tries to compress an idea too much and winds up making a vague statement that can be interpreted in different, or even conflicting, ways. It's easy enough to do this with "correct" or formal writing.
Poke around in the comments section of YouTube and you'll find that this new mode communication isn't really working well, even for the people who use it regularly. It would be more noticeable to the people using it if more of them actually were interested in understanding what other people are saying.
As you imply in your last paragraph, if someone wants to simplify grammar, it needs to be done in such a way that functionality is not lost.
And that's not a problem.
Some idiotic grammatical prescriptions, such as those against splitting infinitives, beginning sentences with conjunctions, and ending them with prepositions, are nonsense. They don't clarify the language.
As Winston Churchill famously said, "this is something up with which I will not put!"
the skill set required for someone to get a Ph.D in any given field has very little correlation with the skillsets required for such tasks as dressing oneself, attending to personal hygeine, or speaking in coherent sentences
That's utterly false. Only the most Mickey-Mouse universities would award a Ph.D to someone who couldn't effectively write a dissertation or academic paper. The ability to effectively communicate is critical for academics and they are, in general, very well-spoken individuals who can clearly express ideas both within and outside their area of expertise. Good scientific writing requires clear, concise and understandable grammar.
Gud luck gettn' funding w/ bad grammar ;-)
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Shakespeare... if he was sitting one of these courses, he'd probably fail by the same criteria
Doubtful, since Shakespeare actually knew the language, and could use it. He used slang and nonproper words for literary effect, and not because he didn't know any better. These students don't actually know English, Shakespeare did, the comparison is false.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey