I'd like to invite all of you to weep for the future with me this morning.

[leeroysphitz]

My wife, Teresa, is in her last year of obtaining her nursing degree. She attends classes with men and women much younger than the two of us thirty seven year olds. I'm not sure how some of these kids have made it into the program and the thought of my future health care being their hands is SCARY.

Here is an excerpt from one students post to an online course that my wife emailed me:

Do you see what I mean? This is a classmate's recent Lifespan Development forum post. These posts are graded. They (supposedly) constitute 25% of our overall grade.

***************

I relly didn't like this video but it was one thing that caught my interest which was when they compaired men and woman that taked the math test and the hypothesis was the men was going to succeed rather than the women. I agree and disagree at the same time because I don't think a test should determin rather or not you are smart. Everybody are not good test takerers and when come down to take the test a person freeze up and gets nervous. It can be that the person is having a bad day and has a lot on there mind but that don't mean that this person is stupid or didn't study the material.

I am not a math person and I never was good in it that's why I chose a proffession that dosen't require a lot of math. The funny thing about is my younger brother is very good in math and I find myself sometimes asking him for help but that wouldn't make him smarter then me because he is good math test taker then me. I think it depends on the person not on the test taking skills.

This has not been embellished in any way. I don't know anything about this student other than the fact that he or she was accepted into, and is somehow still in a nursing program.

Weeeee!!!! Have fun next time you check into the hospital! :hi:

[Lil Missy]

1. That IS scary. She obviously cannot spell or create a grammatically correct sentence.

[Pierre.Suave]

2. and is unaware that

there is math to do for nurses...

Can not generate a coherent thought and write it out clearly...

Which makes me think her brain is muddled with too much Britney Spears et al...

Edit, that is scary indeed...

[Lil Missy]

6. Spelling and grammar is something most of us learn early on in grade school or Jr. High.

It's something that should be taken for granted once you enter a specialized field, such as being a nurse.

If I had a caretaker who talked to me like that, I'd request a new assignment immediately.

[Pierre.Suave]

8. yeah me too

she seems to just be babbling out an unedited stream of what consciousness she has.

[Lil Missy]

13. I had a serious bout with kidney failure last year, and spent 4 days in critical care unit.

I was very sick and barely conscious, but I did hear everything that was going on around me, even though I was not able to respond.

But I tell you what, if I would have heard a nurse that talked like that or seemed incompetent, my BP and heart monitors would have gone berserk with a hypertensive crisis!

[Pierre.Suave]

22. ouch

I am glad you are better. :hug:

I have spent time in hospitals too and thankfully have never ran into anyone like the girl quoted above.

I would like to think that no respectable hospital would hire someone that talks like that, not that I wish her the inability to get a job, but she really should work on her writing, and no doubt speaking skills as well.

[China_cat]

10. Not unexpected from someone who went through

a so-called educational system that considers correct spelling as 'unimportant' and grammar as something a child will pick up 'later'.

I've had teachers tell me that as long as the word is recognizable in some form, the correct spelling isn't important. That a child will eventually learn to spell as they get older. (This after an argument with my youngest's teacher about not taking off points for bad spelling...including his NAME...in 5th grade)

And the kids can't read because they can't recognize the correct spelling over what they've been allowed to create.

[frickaline]

3. Perhaps English isn't this person's first language?

One can only hope.

[greenbriar]

14. That was my first thought

eom

[leeroysphitz]

26. Indeed. n/t

[NewEnglandGirl]

4. That can actually lead to a serious mistake

In healthcare you have to be able to write orders accurately, mistakes can be critical.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. Poor writing comes from

1. Not reading enough. Reading good prose improves your vocabulary and gives you a feeling for how prose should be organized. One of my former students was considered an excellent writer, and she told me that her poor rural high school system offered almost no instruction in writing, but since she read so much, she absorbed the principles of good writing over time.

2. Not writing enough and not having that writing evaluated. You need to hear how your writing affects other people. For example, "I don't care how smart you are. If you write 'taked,' people are going to think you're stupid."

I don't think the student whose writing is quoted here is stupid, but she has been very badly taught. Perhaps she went through a school system where the taxpayers were unwilling to pay for small class sizes, so the English teachers were too overburdened to give and grade writing assignments. If a teacher has 30 students in each class and teaches 5 periods per day, that's 150 essays to grade. As a veteran of marking papers and exams, I can understand why teachers don't want to do this and resort to giving multiple choice tests.

I've met people who sound quite intelligent when speaking but who can't put together a logical paragraph.

[Pierre.Suave]

9. I agree mostly with you Lydia

you are of course, once again the voice of reason.

1) I was just discussing the value of reading with a wonderful lady I met that happens to be a poet. We both agreed that the best way to increase your command of the English language was to read, and read a lot.

2) Would a smart person write like this? use the word "taked?" Or, how about "test takerers?" I agree this could be the direct result of a horrid school system, or one in which there was no negative consequent for writing like this. I think this points to a lack of clear thought going on inside her head though. edit: not necessarily for the typos or wrong words, but the writing overall.

[ikojo]

7. I have a friend who teaches a social psychology

class at a local community college. He gets papers like the one posted by the OP all of the time. He said what he looks for is an understanding of the subject not grammar. He said he's not an English teacher so he doesn't knock off for spelling and grammar. I think he and others who accept such papers do a huge disservice to the students. If they get an A or even a B on the paper they think nothing is wrong with their grammar and spelling.

Wait until they get to the corporate world!!

[realisticphish]

11. haha

working in a corporate environment, spelling and grammar means nothing. Sure, a presentation might be meticulously spellchecked, etc, but interoffice communication? It's pathetic. People who make 100 grand can't use the correct "too" or "their," and can't spell some pretty basic words.

[Pierre.Suave]

12. That is really sad

[realisticphish]

16. there's one guy

who TYPES EVERY MESSAGE IN CAPS AND USES TOO MANY FUCKING EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i want to murder him every time i get an email from him

[Pierre.Suave]

24. But it is REALLY IMPORTANT!!!!!!!!!!!!

:P

[Lydia Leftcoast]

35. When I taught Japanese, I used to correct my students' English spelling and grammar,

but the notion of cross-disciplinary knowledge was so foreign to them that they were astonished and resentful. A self-declared elementary education major once dropped my class after I commented that she should take college as an opportunity to master proper English usage. (The writing in question was a listening test. The students were supposed to listen to a passage that my assistant read aloud in Japanese and then summarize it in English.)

I once amazed them when a group of students were discussing their world literature class before my class, and one of them said, "What was that one where the people have gone to the country to escape the plague?"

"The Decameron," I said.

"How did you know that? You're a Japanese teacher."

[Rabrrrrrr]

15. I was speaking with a teacher (elementary) a few days ago

she's an almost 30-year veteran of teaching, and she told me that a number of years ago schools stopped teaching spelling and grammar and penmanship, and that, in some asinine push for "not hurting a kid's self-esteem", grading on grammar and spelling isn't done much any more.

Finally had explained for me why, in my many years of helping to teach confirmation classes, I've seen papers and written things that are so poorly written, even by junior and senior high kids, from a penmanship standpoint to a grammar standpoint to a spelling standpoint.

And many of these are really, really bright kids - but thanks to a liberal "self-esteem" agenda and a concomitant republican "keep 'em stupid and fuck the schools" agenda, we're turning out some really pathetic people.

No wonder India cranks out 10 times as many engineers and scientists as we do.

And colleges aren't helping, either, by not forcing the students to learn to write well. Colleges are turning into job skillz fairz, and not institutions of education.

[Pierre.Suave]

19. I disagree with one point there

If I had turned in a writing assignment like that at Michigan, I would have been given a big fat F and told to go take a remedial english/writing/grammar class.

[Shakespeare]

20. Yep. That disastrous "Whole Language" approach.

I've ranted about it for years. We're just now seeing the damage this approach has done, as the first students of the hideous "whole language" experiment are now reaching adulthood.

Colleges are now forced to offer remedial freshman comp classes. Think about that (I had to teach some of them). Young adults who are accepted into college even though they have terrible grammar skills.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

17. If she/he is not good at math, how will she know if she is giving the

proper dosage of medication x( :scared: :shrug:

[mulsh]

18. When I worked in a forensic lab there were a couple of "highly

educated" techs who bragged that they hadn't read a book since high school. These were both people with masters degrees. They were both good at math.

[Shakespeare]

21. My inner freshman comp instructor just had a gran mal seizure.

That's maddeningly sad.

[Pierre.Suave]

23. Oh god

some of the things I saw in my Freshman comp classes were startling.

It left me wondering how these kids got into college, and if they had someone else write their essays for them or not.

edit for a D'OH moment...

[MountainLaurel]

25. This is all very timely

Because on another board I read, there's a lengthy and heated discussion about a woman who has been rewriting papers for her SIL, who is trying to get into nursing school. I almost fell over reading the number of posts from people who think that writing skills don't matter if you're going to be a nurse.

[Rabrrrrrr]

27. It's a result of the job-skillz-ification of higher education.

People don't want an education, they want to learn how to "do a job".

And with the constant dumbification of this country, the only "job" that is assumed that requires writing skillz is being a writer. And so people believe that no matter what their job is, unless they're gonna be a writer, they don't need to know how to write or read.

And they don't need to know math unless they're gonna be a mathematician or engineer or scientist.

And they don't need to know history unless they're gonna teach it.

And they don't need to know philosophy unless they plan to be unemployed the rest of their lives.

And so forth.

[XemaSab]

31. Hell, I'm a biologist/soil scientist, and most of my job is writing.

Writing was taken very seriously in the university I went to, and it's been taken very seriously everywhere I've worked.

My mom's the editor for the company I currently work for, and she says it's absolutely horrific how most technical staff have no writing ability whatsoever. Our company produces environmental documents. You might be a botanist, or an archaeologist, or a fisheries specialist, but if you can't write, your value to the company is greatly diminished.

Yeah, sometimes (like now) I write in a conversational, stream-of-consciousness style, but if I'd written something like the OP, I might have been EXPELLED or FIRED, but worse, I'd have been DISOWNED. :o

[MountainLaurel]

34. I'm a medical editor, so I feel her pain

Frankly, so many jobs out there require strong writing skills (not to mention verbal communication skills), from the security guard who needs to write up incident reports and safety plans to scientists who are writing research results.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

36. Oh yes, and students seem unwilling to venture beyond their narrow specialties

I got so fed up with the students' complete lack of interest in the country whose language they were learning that I set up a system of culture credits. Students had to earn a minimum number of culture credits per term, and these included reading a non-fiction book about Japan, reading a Japanese novel in translation, seeing a Japanese movie, and even small numbers of points for eating at a Japanese restaurant or reading and reporting on a magazine article about Japan.

I told the students that I had an office full of suitable books, which I was willing to lend to them. So the business majors would walk in (80% of my students were business majors) and say, "I'd like to read something about Japanese business."

And I'd say, "I don't have any books about Japanese business. What else are you interested in?"

Silence, in most cases. My copy of The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, a fascinating account of how Japan has modified baseball to match its own cultural norms, was the most popular option. (This was before manga and anime had the cult followings that they do now.)

[Shakespeare]

28. That's a pretty stupid argument. Writing skills are VERY important.

Nurses communicate through writing on medical charts, notes on medications, etc. It's not just a nifty skill to have; in their job, it can be a life or death situation.

[MountainLaurel]

33. Several of us tried to make that point

So much of nursing consists of patient education and communication skills are absolutely vital. But frankly, the individual in question will be weeded out before she even reaches the nursing program, so in the end it's a moot point.

[Carnea]

29. I've seen school teachers write notes like that home to kids.

I have one friend who collected a dozen or so from three different Junior High school teachers her child had and brought them to a school board meeting.

As someone up thread pointed out inner office memos and IM's can be just as bad. But honestly I have fired people for poor written language skills. Many people have been stuck as assistant manager etc because of their inability to communicate properly without being told why.



In postscript. The reason you wouldn't tell someone why they are not being promoted is because of EEOC and sensitivity questions.

[hippywife]

30. The spelling and grammar thing

doesn't scare me really. I work in a senior health care facility and what does scare me is the people getting into the field as CNA's and CMA's. If you check the help wanted ads, these jobs constitute the greatest need at the moment. The people taking the training, in as little as two weeks I might add, are doing so because there are so few jobs to be had anywhere else. They aren't doing it because they are called to it, but because that's where the jobs are. Their lack of real caring is the scary thing. I don't care if they can't spell or have good grammar as long as they have a sense of the compassion that's intrinsic to the career.

[Eurobabe]

32. OMFG!

Don't let Nurse Ratchet near you!

Child Left Behind indeed. :yoiks: