[Sca-cooks] Jonathan Swift was an Optimist

[jenne at fiedlerfamily.net]

>     Actually, this was from Kansas, and had very little of the history of
> that state in the test. The rules of grammar, arithmetic, US history,
> orthography, and geography haven't changed much.

That's true, they probably haven't changed much. Especially since an
education consisting largely of rote memorization has been removed from
the curriculum.

One of the most pointless exercises of my time in school was one year when
they used old-fashioned grammar teaching methods: we had to write out
every rule in the grammar book five times. It might have improved our
handwriting but did nothing for our grammar much less our writing. In
college we had one awful class where we diagrammed POETRY. Guess what--
nobody there had any more idea of what the poem was about after they
diagrammed it.

>     I'll go ahead and post it - if anyone wants to take a crack at it,
> enjoy. But don't feel bad if you don't pass . . . blame the system!

You mean the system that no longer generally uses bushels and rods as
measurement? The one that has multiple ways of calculating bank discounts
and levies? A good chunk of the questions here either rely on memorization
of rules that have very little application in real life (when was the last
time your boss asked you to diagram a sentence?) or relies on the students
having memorized data that we don't generally have memorized because we
don't need it. The rest of it? Can do.

-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa
jenne at fiedlerfamily.net OR jenne at tulgey.browser.net OR jahb at lehigh.edu
"Are you finished? If you're finished, you'll have to put down the spoon."