Perhaps it's also because the Japanese (and virtually every other nation on Earth) allow *failure* in their system.
You don't make grades in a Japanese school...you go to a trade/vocational type school and learn how to weld. It's that simple. I know this is/was the system in Mexico as I went there on a study abroad program in 1995.
Every time something like this is suggested in the US we get to hear about how the self-esteem of children will be destroyed, etc. Our school system seems to value self-esteem more than learning these days.
This got me to thinking...
I don't think it's simply a "self-esteem" problem. Think about the mean attached to this phrase, "Their self-esteem will be destroyed [by forcing them to learn a trade/vocation]."
I think it speaks volumes about the value or stigma that we've placed on those jobs and, by extension, the people who do them. People who make those statements assume that children who learn a trade or vocation will have hurt self-esteem because they, themselves, view those professions as somehow "less-worthy." Those professions are viewed as what a child should avoid being, and this is projected in how their assumptions about how children will feel.
Put it another way, if a kid is happy doing a trade because they have a great aptitude for it, then wouldn't their self-esteem naturally be higher than if they're forced to endure secondary education in preparation for careers that they might NOT have great aptitudes for?
Schools's have been like that since before "No Child Left Behind." The administration [of a school] doesn't like to have kids fail or excel because it ruins their whole "education en masse" approach; which is premised on the twin assumptions that all kids want to learn and that all kids learn at the same general rate [e.g. if johnny fails this year, it's okay, because he'll recover when we move him to 5th grade with all of his classmates].
Not failing kids also creates less paperwork.
I'm not defending NCLB. I'm pointing out that there is something sick in our public schools and no one has come up with a compelling solution.
I remember when we had deal with 256 lbs of slate that we scratched with sharp pebbles. Monochrome displays that refreshed at.00075 hz. To get color, we had to go kill something.
Well, English has always had a problem with the spelling being not quite being consistent the actual pronunciation. I'm not sure this proves the point one way or the other though.
I agree with you on the synthetic languages. On the other hand, it could be argued that the complexity in syntax is just moved into the morphological level.
gorgeous.// splendidly or showily brilliant or magnificent// From gorge, gorget. Etymology: Middle English gorgayse, from Middle French gorgias elegant, from gorgias wimple.
gorgeous Etymology: Middle English gorgayse, from Middle French gorgias elegant, from gorgias wimple, from gorge gorget : splendidly or showily brilliant or magnificent
Shouldn't you be comparing gorgeous (modern) and gorgayse (middle English). It seems that, earliest to most modern it went
gorget -> gorgias -> gorgayse -> gorgeous
No?
I remember from my liguistics classes that it's not really possible to say which language is more complicated than another.
I specifically stated that I was retracting my initial comments, but I kept them in there as a tongue-in-cheek statement. I never said anything about "bad language." I'm well aware of the difference between how language is considered by linguists and English teachers.
As to the relation of written language on the web to spoken language, I don't think that's been established. I know that in dialogue systems, which deal with spoken language as opposed to written language, the productions of people speaking a language are vastly different than those that they write. Therefore, I would err on that side of the argument.
This sort of reminds of me the automatic rifle argument for stricter gun control. They spray more bullets which allow a shooter to potentially hit more people, ergo we must heavily regulate or ban automatic rifles.
Children and potential molesters have access to a pervasive and easy to use communications medium which allows molesters to target more children anonymously. We've already seen attempts at regulation, and apparently they haven't been working (even though there was no increase in molestation rates).
What gets lost in the mix is that the decision to molest, to shoot, comes down to individual responsibility.
Not saying that studies shouldn't look into it. I think it's a worthy research topic, but people shouldn't start jumping the gun. (pun unintended)
Boys are more aggressive than girls. when in class, boys will jump to answer questions, intimidating the girls. Math class can be very unpleasant for the non-aggressive type.
Actually, this could be one of those fabled biological differences. If aggression is caused by body chemicals, then the fact that boys tend to be more agressive than girls could explain some of the social outcomes.
That said, you're dead right on this observation:
When a woman finally does get a degree, she is discriminated against by all-male faculties and tenure boards.
This is true, and male colleagues can be very condescending. My best friend was given a highly sexist graduate advisor when she first got to our school. She became so fed up with his snide remarks that she switched advisors. Like it or not, there are some men who genuinely believe that women should not be in engineering or science.
So yeah. Summers is wrong. Quote all the "studies" you want.
Well, what Summers was suggesting were studies to confirm or disprove this. Those are hard to do because there are alot of factors to control for. I don't think he was out of line suggesting that, science is supposed to be about truth, not social norms.
The danger I see is that some may use the outcomes of those types of studies as justification for discrimination against women.
Personally, I don't really care one way or the other. The scientists I work with are all women in engineering disciplines and they'll kick just about anyone's ass in intellectual prowess.
Because, unlike the parent's assumption, the phenomenon isn't related to computers. It's related to text messaging. It might be just as fast to type "you" instead of "u" with a keyboard, but it's noticably slower on mobile phones, especially before predictive text became popular.
I'd still advance the argument that extensive use of computers by a larger portion of the population has contributed to the phenomenon. I remember seeing those abbreviations before cell-phone use became almost ubiquitous.
It's also not just little things like modifying the spelling of words, but also syntax and morphological changes.
I for one am not under that misconception. However I disagree with many/.ers who argue that the fluidity of language means that making it up as you go along is acceptable. "It's" is not a posessive, and you can't loose your shoe if the laces are lose.
Right now, yes. But in a generation or two, perhaps they'll lose the distinction.
Hopefully, they'll harvest well written webpages for data and not those of 13-year old girls drooling over Orlando Bloom, AOL users, or porn sites.
Actually, I take that back.
It could actually be very interesting from a lexical or morphological point of view. The phenomenon of abbreviating words, such as "u" for "you" or "ur" for "you're" or "ru" for "are you." Language teachers in classrooms have been seeing it crop up in actual homework assignments. While reading such language may be like having glass wiped across the eyes of people educated before computers came into wide-spread use, it's interesting how it's affecting younger people.
There's a collision between the high tech world children grew up with today and the way language is taught in schools in a similar way to the situation with how students speak on the street versus how they are expected to speak in the classroom or the professional world. Remember when it was proposed that ebonics be considered a valid dialect for using in the classroom?
What would be even more interesting to study is how keyboard effect the structure of languages. It seems that people are under the assumption that languages are static and don't change, but this is incorrect.
Because the keyboard is still the main way of inputing information into the computer, people take short cuts and I would be surprised if that didn't start to effect their use of language in other contexts.
I'm just rambling, but such studies would be akin to socialogical studies that look at the influence of technology on social organization.
That's the entymology of the word, but the meaning as generalized as time has moved on. Sort of how gay evolved from meaning happy and joyful to referring to homosexuals.
Slashdot Mirror
This got me to thinking...
I don't think it's simply a "self-esteem" problem. Think about the mean attached to this phrase, "Their self-esteem will be destroyed [by forcing them to learn a trade/vocation]."
I think it speaks volumes about the value or stigma that we've placed on those jobs and, by extension, the people who do them. People who make those statements assume that children who learn a trade or vocation will have hurt self-esteem because they, themselves, view those professions as somehow "less-worthy." Those professions are viewed as what a child should avoid being, and this is projected in how their assumptions about how children will feel.
Put it another way, if a kid is happy doing a trade because they have a great aptitude for it, then wouldn't their self-esteem naturally be higher than if they're forced to endure secondary education in preparation for careers that they might NOT have great aptitudes for?
*sigh*
Ignore the "'s" in "Schools's"
Schools's have been like that since before "No Child Left Behind." The administration [of a school] doesn't like to have kids fail or excel because it ruins their whole "education en masse" approach; which is premised on the twin assumptions that all kids want to learn and that all kids learn at the same general rate [e.g. if johnny fails this year, it's okay, because he'll recover when we move him to 5th grade with all of his classmates].
Not failing kids also creates less paperwork.
I'm not defending NCLB. I'm pointing out that there is something sick in our public schools and no one has come up with a compelling solution.
Gates donated money for the new Stata center which CSAIL (Computer Science and AI Laboratory) now calls home. There's even a tower named after Gates.
Care to flail about some more?
Jokes like that should be a sin.
I remember when we had deal with 256 lbs of slate that we scratched with sharp pebbles. Monochrome displays that refreshed at .00075 hz. To get color, we had to go kill something.
meh.
FILLER
I almost made it to the second paragraph without laughing.
Brilliant.
Would this be an instance of recursive joking or iterative joking?
I want to know what the punchline is, but if there's going to be a stack overflow anyway, I might as well not bother.
Well, English has always had a problem with the spelling being not quite being consistent the actual pronunciation. I'm not sure this proves the point one way or the other though.
I agree with you on the synthetic languages. On the other hand, it could be argued that the complexity in syntax is just moved into the morphological level.
gorgeous
Etymology: Middle English gorgayse, from Middle French gorgias elegant, from gorgias wimple, from gorge gorget
: splendidly or showily brilliant or magnificent
Shouldn't you be comparing gorgeous (modern) and gorgayse (middle English). It seems that, earliest to most modern it went
gorget -> gorgias -> gorgayse -> gorgeous
No?
I remember from my liguistics classes that it's not really possible to say which language is more complicated than another.
I don't think this has been established one way or another. Linguistic complexity would be an incredibly difficult term to objectively quantify.
Looks like someone didn't read my entire comment.
I specifically stated that I was retracting my initial comments, but I kept them in there as a tongue-in-cheek statement. I never said anything about "bad language." I'm well aware of the difference between how language is considered by linguists and English teachers.
As to the relation of written language on the web to spoken language, I don't think that's been established. I know that in dialogue systems, which deal with spoken language as opposed to written language, the productions of people speaking a language are vastly different than those that they write. Therefore, I would err on that side of the argument.
This sort of reminds of me the automatic rifle argument for stricter gun control. They spray more bullets which allow a shooter to potentially hit more people, ergo we must heavily regulate or ban automatic rifles.
Children and potential molesters have access to a pervasive and easy to use communications medium which allows molesters to target more children anonymously. We've already seen attempts at regulation, and apparently they haven't been working (even though there was no increase in molestation rates).
What gets lost in the mix is that the decision to molest, to shoot, comes down to individual responsibility.
Not saying that studies shouldn't look into it. I think it's a worthy research topic, but people shouldn't start jumping the gun. (pun unintended)
Oh yeah, I forgot to qualify that with "In a reasonable debate"
Actually, this could be one of those fabled biological differences. If aggression is caused by body chemicals, then the fact that boys tend to be more agressive than girls could explain some of the social outcomes.
That said, you're dead right on this observation:
This is true, and male colleagues can be very condescending. My best friend was given a highly sexist graduate advisor when she first got to our school. She became so fed up with his snide remarks that she switched advisors. Like it or not, there are some men who genuinely believe that women should not be in engineering or science.
Well, what Summers was suggesting were studies to confirm or disprove this. Those are hard to do because there are alot of factors to control for. I don't think he was out of line suggesting that, science is supposed to be about truth, not social norms.
The danger I see is that some may use the outcomes of those types of studies as justification for discrimination against women.
Personally, I don't really care one way or the other. The scientists I work with are all women in engineering disciplines and they'll kick just about anyone's ass in intellectual prowess.
If someone is called a redneck here, it is clear that their intelligence is being questioned.
That's what I get for posting tired.
Heh. I guess it's too easy to make /.ers laugh.
I'd still advance the argument that extensive use of computers by a larger portion of the population has contributed to the phenomenon. I remember seeing those abbreviations before cell-phone use became almost ubiquitous.
It's also not just little things like modifying the spelling of words, but also syntax and morphological changes.
Right now, yes. But in a generation or two, perhaps they'll lose the distinction.
Whoops.
Hopefully, they'll harvest well written webpages for data and not those of 13-year old girls drooling over Orlando Bloom, AOL users, or porn sites.
Actually, I take that back.
It could actually be very interesting from a lexical or morphological point of view. The phenomenon of abbreviating words, such as "u" for "you" or "ur" for "you're" or "ru" for "are you." Language teachers in classrooms have been seeing it crop up in actual homework assignments. While reading such language may be like having glass wiped across the eyes of people educated before computers came into wide-spread use, it's interesting how it's affecting younger people.
There's a collision between the high tech world children grew up with today and the way language is taught in schools in a similar way to the situation with how students speak on the street versus how they are expected to speak in the classroom or the professional world. Remember when it was proposed that ebonics be considered a valid dialect for using in the classroom?
What would be even more interesting to study is how keyboard effect the structure of languages. It seems that people are under the assumption that languages are static and don't change, but this is incorrect.
Because the keyboard is still the main way of inputing information into the computer, people take short cuts and I would be surprised if that didn't start to effect their use of language in other contexts.
I'm just rambling, but such studies would be akin to socialogical studies that look at the influence of technology on social organization.
That's the entymology of the word, but the meaning as generalized as time has moved on. Sort of how gay evolved from meaning happy and joyful to referring to homosexuals.
No, "white trash" is a racist slur. Redneck is just a regional slur.
There's a difference between criticism and ad hominem attacks based on stereotypes.