johnlawrenceaspden comments on Two More Things to Unlearn from School - Less Wrong

54 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 July 2007 05:45PM

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Comment author: bigjeff5 02 January 2012 06:11:30PM 6 points [-]

I will say that I also had a high school English teacher who would use the wrong word or give a ridiculous interpretation in the hopes that a student would correct him and learn to not always trust authority.

I had a teacher somewhat similar to that my freshman year in high school, except she was a last-minute replacement and was not really an English teacher. Her grammar was atrocious, and I ended up getting detention for correcting her too often (interrupting class or lack of respect or some such was the reason given on the detention). It was probably my first real experience with an authority figure being so utterly and obviously wrong, and I wasn't sorry at all for the detention. It was well worth it.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden comment score below threshold [+] (12 children)

Comment author: Kindly 27 August 2012 03:21:29PM 9 points [-]

You might disagree that grammar ought to be important, but as long as it is important and as long as English class is meant to teach it, it's inexcusable for the teacher not to know it.

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Comment author: thomblake 27 August 2012 04:16:52PM 5 points [-]

yall really care about grammer and speling

Yes, we care about that. Anything written improperly will take longer to read and interpret, and so by a little extra effort now you can save your readers much extra effort later. Failing to take this common courtesy is worthy of a downvote.

are youse objecting to the viciousness of my attack

Making any "attack" is downvote-worthy on its own.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 27 August 2012 04:53:32PM -1 points [-]

Anything written improperly will take longer to read and interpret

Must add up to hours, added up over a lifetime. But it's a great way of telling the uneducated to keep their ill-informed opinions to themselves. Which is often a useful thing to be able to say politely.

Bad spelling and grammar are good bayesy evidence that the speaker doesn't know what they're talking about. But they're not a moral issue.

Just imagine what this class was like from the teacher's point of view, with someone constantly making her feel inferior while she was trying to communicate something. If she was from a poor background and had nevertheless become an English teacher she might well have had something interesting to say.

I think we're both wasting time on this silly argument I've started. I'll give you the last word and not respond.

Comment author: bigjeff5 01 September 2012 06:17:28PM 5 points [-]

I think in my previous post the implication is that I believe the punishment was unwarranted. That is not the case (though I certainly felt that way at the time). I simply felt the reason given for the detention was less important than the experience of realizing that authority figures can be wrong.

It was entirely appropriate for the teacher to give me detention, because I actually was interrupting class when she was trying to teach, and I don't think I was being particularly helpful to the rest of the students. What she was teaching was correct, as far as I can remember, however there isn't much a person can do about 40+ years of poor habits when it comes to speaking English.

She was in a bad position, and did a reasonable job under the circumstances. I was just a bratty little smart aleck making her life difficult.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 03 September 2012 02:31:06PM 2 points [-]

Cheers, bigjeff5. My comment was deliberately inflammatory and I apologize for it. The very idea of "correct English" makes me suspend rational thought.

My own background is complicated, but my mother's father was a Sheffield Irish steelworker and him (sic) and his wife cared very much about all that sort of thing.

I wrote a bit of a rant about it here:

http://johnlawrenceaspden.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/grammer.html

In case anyone likes rants.

Comment author: bigjeff5 01 September 2012 06:29:11PM 0 points [-]

It couldn't be that, I was raised among the proletariat. Not much prestige dialect signalling there. (There is some, of course, but nothing like the bourgeoisie.)

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 03 September 2012 02:40:46PM 1 point [-]

As far as I can tell, all English people are completely obsessed with class and signalling issues, except possibly the royal family, who I imagine feel fairly secure. I don't know what it's like in the rest of the world, though.

Have you read 'Watching the English' by Kate Fox, or Paul Fussell's 'Guide to the American Class System', that yvain linked to here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/did/what_is_signaling_really/

johnlawrenceaspden comments on Two More Things to Unlearn from School - Less Wrong

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