quote:Too bad they don't have a course in people skills, or, say, how to be a human being, for science majors.
But I became a science major so I wouldn't have to deal with people! That's what salespeople are for!
Posts: 3486 | Registered: Sep 2002
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quote:Originally posted by FlyingCow: People who are drawn to the the sciences are less likely to have the social flexibility to handle the controlled chaos that are teenage lives (at least in my experience).
Case in point, King of Men, who sees nothing wrong with coming into a person's thread to state, repeatedly, that her choice of vocation is worthless.
It's not my fault if Belle insists on making bad choices of major.
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Icarus, I've not taken calculus, but I had my husband (the math major) teach it to me because I always wanted to learn and felt a lack that I hadn't ever taken it. Plus I wanted to set a good example for my daughter who was in a "math is for boys and I'll never be good at it" stage. Which fortunately she seems to be outgrowing. I did plan on taking calculus, but that was when I thought I'd have electives to spare and now I do not.
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My people skills are fine. I just don't like having to use them.
Hey, Belle, sorry about having to jump through all those hoops. Bureaucracy is a pain to deal with. I often wonder if higher education is less about learning and expanding one's horizons and more about filling out paperwork and going through the motions. I wish you the best, and I'm glad you want to be a secondary school teacher. I had a good experience in high school because of my awesome teachers.
Oh, and tell your daughter that math is NOT just for boys. I can run annuli around most of the boys in my math classes.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Bob_Scopatz: I once ate a donut hole and still had a whole donut left, whereas if you eat a whole donut, will no longer have a donut hole.
There is a message hidden here for KoM. Can you find it?
Donut be a hole?
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quote:Originally posted by Samarkand: ... [snipped out lots of good stuff, just to reduce length for quote] ... There's a reason why science is poorly understood and appreciated; it's because most scientists don't know how to communicate with people outside their field. Part of the solution is to ensure a solid grounding in science for students. But the other side must reach out as well, and that's why English teachers are so important.
Samarkand, I think that was an absolutely brilliant post, and I'm saving it for future reference. Thanks.
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quote: As for critical thinking, you can't do it without a thorough grounding in arithmetic, algebra, and logical reasoning - which cannot be taught any better than the hard sciences do.
I would hope that people in college already have a thorough grounding in atirthmetic and algebra... and hard science classes do not excel at teaching logical reasoning. Soft sciences, math, economics, engineering, and philosophy are much better at teaching logical reasoning - because they rely less on direct experimentation and more on inferences.
In addition, critical thinking is most useful when paired with communication skills - which the English major excels at teaching. You need to understand what someone is telling you in order to approach it critically. You need to be able to express yourself in order to tell anyone else what you have critically thought. For a teacher, this is especially important, because their job entails understanding and communicating with students and parents.
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It's because of people like that that I have a job. Really, we shouldn't need technical writers at all because ideally the technical people could communicate it themselves.
They often (usually) can't. Their attempts are amusing but unhelpful.
Knowledge that cannot be communicated may as well not exist.
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I gave a presentation to my peers where I included a few jokes as well as an attempt to make sure everyone understood it. We receive feedback and one of the comments I got was that including jokes was an insult to their intelligence, as well as explaining certain concepts. My talk was not "sciencey" enough for them. I figured, well, no one fell asleep during my presentation and during that person's presentation, several people fell asleep and frankly, that means more to me then coming off as smart.
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quote:I would hope that people in college already have a thorough grounding in atirthmetic and algebra...
Yes, wouldn't you?
quote:and hard science classes do not excel at teaching logical reasoning. Soft sciences, math, economics, engineering, and philosophy are much better at teaching logical reasoning - because they rely less on direct experimentation and more on inferences.
How many hard-science classes have you in fact taken? You trying doing quantum mechanics without drawing inferences.
quote:In addition, critical thinking is most useful when paired with communication skills - which the English major excels at teaching.
You do know what authors, surely the premier example of people good at communicating, tend to think of English majors, yes?
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: It's because of people like that that I have a job. Really, we shouldn't need technical writers at all because ideally the technical people could communicate it themselves.
They often (usually) can't. Their attempts are amusing but unhelpful.
Knowledge that cannot be communicated may as well not exist.
I was asked to write documentation once. Once...
Since then my employer stated that I was to *never* attempt to write documentation again.
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quote:How many hard-science classes have you in fact taken? You trying doing quantum mechanics without drawing inferences.
12 credits - none of which was quantum mechanics, although it should be noted that I never said hard science could be done without any inferences whatsoever. All subject areas use inferences. Some just rely on the logical process more than others.
quote:You do know what authors, surely the premier example of people good at communicating, tend to think of English majors, yes?
Authors, in general, are not the premier example of people good at communicating. Many of them are poor at public speaking, and a few of them aren't even that good at writing clearly. What they ARE good at is authoring books that people will buy and/or enjoy. They are usually skilled in the art of creating ideas.
The premier examples of people good at communicating would probably be journalists, teachers, corporate spokespersons, politicians, and technical writers. And I suspect many of these are English majors.
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quote:You do know what authors, surely the premier example of people good at communicating, tend to think of English majors, yes?
Seeing as most of the published folk I know were English/History/Communication/Theater majors, I'm not sure where you're going there. Are you claiming that people who major in the hard sciences are better writers?
Plus, as was just mentioned, authors are not necessarily great communicators, and great communicators are not necessarily great authors.
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I see this problem all the time. The education standards have gotten out of control and the Education Departments can barely keep up with the YEARLY changes in requirements. NCLB is a joke.
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quote:I was asked to write documentation once. Once...
Since then my employer stated that I was to *never* attempt to write documentation again.
Nicely done.
Part of the problem is that the rewards for writing good documentation are:
1) You'll be asked to produce more of it. 2) It'll be easier to replace you now that you've turned one of your quasi-magical powers into a set of instructions that anyone can carry out.
The incentives to improve just aren't there.
Posts: 148 | Registered: Feb 2000
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If your point, Glenn, is that diagramming requires critical thinking skill, then I believe you are missing KoM's point. He is not saying that language skills are unimportant, or that critical thought is unimportant in the language arts. When he says nobody should become a secondary school language arts teacher, his point is not that language arts should not be taught. Heck, look at how often he posts simply to point out that somebody has made a grammatical mistake--clearly, he is no hater of language. No, KoM's purpose seems clearly to be to put down not the discipline but the people. He is crapping in this thread because it makes him feel good about himself to call people stupid.
In other words, he's trolling.
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I must disagree, for the good and simple reason that what is taught at college-level English departments is hardly the rudiments of grammar. (At least, I hope it isn't!) Hence, I see no contradiction in dissing both English majors and people who can't, or won't, learn to spell.
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I feel absolutely no shame in the fact that I don't care enough to learn how to spell "correctly" all the words I use.
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Since when does one need a four-year degree to teach kids the difference between the subejct and the object? It's important, but it's not difficult.
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What should the requirements be to teach high school kids how to write? A high school diploma?
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One of my graduate courses includes, partly, grammar. I don't mean subject/predicate. I mean making sure that everyone knows where to put commas, the difference between active/passive voice, positive vs. negative voice, who vs. whom, when to put hyphens...the little nitpicky things that many people either never knew or have forgotten.
posted
Actually I didn't forget how to use hyphens and commas, who vs. whom etc it was deliberately trained out of me by a well meaning 'advanced' English teacher in 11th grade who gave us packets upon packet upon packets of worksheets for every rule. After doing essentially the same 'correction' 200 times I no longer could understand what was correct and incorrect, I only knew how to to automatically plug and chug through the english problems presented to us by the worksheets. Ever since that class I've had the worst trouble with commas and apostrophes. I have to carefully think about it to get it right. My grammer doesn't come with the casual ease it once did.
This teacher also thought it was a good idea to teach the concept of 'frame story' by making the class read aloud the beginning and ending frames, then she yammered on and on about how wonderful a device it was, then we reading the middle chunk to ourselves. She foisted this outrage upon Mark Twain, to a story I dearly loved. I was furious.
quote:What should the requirements be to teach high school kids how to write? A high school diploma?
The only safe mentors of children are certified experts with state-licensed conditioning; children must be protected from the uncertified.
quote:What should the requirements be to teach high school kids how to write? A high school diploma?
I would think mainly just the ability to write, an interest in writing, and the ability to teach it effectively to kids. That last part would be one most people can't fulfill.
In truth, however, I haven't seen much reason to believe that doing advanced studies in English makes one better at teaching writing to kids. In high school at least, I probably learned more writing skills from non-English classes than from my English classes. It was those teachers that taught us what was actually useful in practice (what you'd need to do to communicate effectively, rather than what you needed to do in order to satisfy strange grammatical rules.) They understood writing from the perspective of using it for other disciplines, rather than from having studied it for its own sake.
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Its important to note high school English is usually more about teaching students how to read than how to write.
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quote:Originally posted by pH: One of my graduate courses includes, partly, grammar. I don't mean subject/predicate. I mean making sure that everyone knows where to put commas, the difference between active/passive voice, positive vs. negative voice, who vs. whom, when to put hyphens...the little nitpicky things that many people either never knew or have forgotten.
-pH
Positive and negative voice? There's no such thing.
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quote:Since when does one need a four-year degree to teach kids the difference between the subejct and the object? It's important, but it's not difficult.
First, a parallel argument could be "Since when does one need a four-year degree to teach kids the difference between multiplication and division?" See how silly that sounds? Math is far more than that, and English is far more than subject/object differentiation.
To tear an entire field of study down to a simple component does not make a valid argument. Creating valid theses and arguments is another element of English as a field of study, btw.
Further, even with something as simple as subject/object difference, you claim it's not difficult.
Have you taught a class of 30 twelve year olds the difference between a subject and an object? Have they all learned the concept enough to understand and apply it? Do they all know when to use me v. I, or us v. we, or other common subject/object misconceptions?
It's not a difficult concept. Then again, neither is division. However, students struggle with division more than anything they've been taught previously, and failures in understanding send ripple effects through their understanding of decimals, fractions, and algebra.
It's not "easy" to teach students anything, KoM. Some things go more smoothly than others, obviously, but whenever you present something new to a group of children/teenagers who may or may not care one iota about a word you say, there's far more than just presenting the material.
If it was as easy as you make it, we could just hand out books with all the information in them and expect the students to figure it out themselves.
Edit to add: It's also normally the hard science majors who make statements starting with: "I'm supposed to teach math/science, not..."
They then proceed to finish the sentence with "...be a counselor" or "...be a therapist" or "...be a parent" or "...be a role model" or "...be an advocate."
It's nice to think that teaching just means presenting material, and many hard science folk come in thinking it's just that. However, presenting material is only a component of the job (and often a small one). If you can't gain the trust of the students, help them to get past the barriers they've created, help them feel safe in the classroom both physically and socially, help them feel part of a community that values academic success... if you can't do any of that, you can present the material all the live long day without your students learning a thing.
It causes a lot of hard science folks to wash out, realizing it's a lot more than they bargained for and retreating back to a more linear career.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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So in that bit of text, which part is the one where you argue that an English major helps you teach?
And before you ask, hard science helps you teach because, essentially, it teaches you how to debug. You cannot do math, lab, or programming without learning how to go back to your assumptions and figure out which part is giving you trouble.
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KoM, If what you were saying is true, then one would expect that expertise in hard science would translate automatically into excellence in teaching, which it obviously does not.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:Originally posted by pH: One of my graduate courses includes, partly, grammar. I don't mean subject/predicate. I mean making sure that everyone knows where to put commas, the difference between active/passive voice, positive vs. negative voice, who vs. whom, when to put hyphens...the little nitpicky things that many people either never knew or have forgotten.
-pH
Positive and negative voice? There's no such thing.
In managerial communications, they teach you a lot about how to word things in a way to get people to do what you want. So instead of saying "Don't do this," you have to turn it into "Please do such-and-such." Which can actually be a pain.
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: KoM, If what you were saying is true, then one would expect that expertise in hard science would translate automatically into excellence in teaching, which it obviously does not.
Necessary, not sufficient. Possibly not even necessary, just 'more-likely-to-lead-to'.
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I disagree. I've had many science teachers who were, in fact, very very poor teachers. I've also had many teachers in the so-called "softer" subjects who were absolutely marvelous. I don't think science is any more likely to lead to excellence in teaching than any other field.
My English class experience was like fugu's--lots of reading and analysis of reading. I did have one teacher who focused a great deal on writing and communicating effectively (and there's MUCH more to that than good spelling and grammar). Our writing in her class, however, was heavily focused on writing analytical critiques of literature.
Incidentally, I attribute much of my writing skill to that teacher.
Posts: 4077 | Registered: Jun 2003
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quote:Originally posted by pH: In managerial communications, they teach you a lot about how to word things in a way to get people to do what you want. So instead of saying "Don't do this," you have to turn it into "Please do such-and-such." Which can actually be a pain.
-pH
And that's why I will never be a manager.
Well, that or my insistance of adding the word "moron" to the end of the sentence.
Posts: 3486 | Registered: Sep 2002
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quote:No, KoM's purpose seems clearly to be to put down not the discipline but the people. He is crapping in this thread because it makes him feel good about himself to call people stupid.
I understand that part. It's quite clear that KoM is very insecure.
No, the point I was making was not merely that diagramming a sentence requires critical thinking skills, but that a thoroughly diagrammed sentence is an exercise in pure logic, which is at least (if not more, due to nuance) as rigorous as a mathematical proof.
BTW I'm a math major, not an english major. But I remember seeing a set of diagrams that detailed the differences between the sentences "I've been to the store," and "I've gone to the store" that knocked my socks off.
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quote:So instead of saying "Don't do this," you have to turn it into "Please do such-and-such."
That's problematic in other ways. It may be a neat trick, but by telling people what to do rather than telling people what to avoid, you are drawing artifical boundaries, often resulting in people thinking that there is only one way to perform a given task.
If my opinion mattered, instead of saying, "Don't do this," say, "We want (the desired result.)," and if need be, show how the behavior is not consistent with producing the desired result, that way, you are getting rid of the bad behavior and discouraging group think.
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